arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Closing the Speech-Text Gap with Limited Audio for Effective Domain Adaptation in LLM-Based ASR

arXiv:2604.06487v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems rely on paired speech-text data for domain adaptation. Recent LLM-based ASR arch...

By Thibault Ba\~neras-Roux, Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Dairazalia S\'anchez-Cort\'es, Shiran Liu, Severin Baroudi, Shashi Kumar, Hasindri Watawana, Manjunath K E, Kadri Hacioglu, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Rethinking Entropy Allocation in LLM-based ASR: Understanding the Dynamics between Speech Encoders and LLMs

The paper revisits large‑language‑model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) from an entropy‑allocation perspective, introducing three metrics to analyze how entropy reduction is distributed between the speech encoder and the LLM. It proposes a multi‑stage training strategy that addresses entropy‑allocation inefficiencies, including a redesigned pretraining phase to reduce the speech‑text modality gap and an iterative asynchronous fine‑tuning stage to maintain functional decoupling and limit encoder drift. Experiments on Mandarin and English benchmarks demonstrate competitive performance with state‑of‑the‑art models using only 2.3 B parameters, while also reducing hallucinations through the decoupling‑oriented design.

By Yuan Xie, Jiaqi Song, Guang Qiu, Xianliang Wang, Ming Lei, Jie Gao, Jie Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Benchmarking_Fast_Domain_Adaptation_for_Unsupervised_Speech_Units

The paper introduces ABX-Accent, a benchmark built on the AESRC dataset that evaluates how well representation learning models adapt to 10 different English accents with less than 10 hours of unlabeled data per accent. It adapts the Zero Resources Challenge ABX metrics for each accent and demonstrates a baseline using adaptive domain normalization to fine‑tune a Contrastive Predictive Coding model, achieving a 23.6% relative improvement on across‑speaker ABX scores compared to non‑adapted models. The dataset and evaluation metrics will be released publicly after the paper is accepted.

By Robin San Roman, Manel Khentout, Tu Anh Nguyen, Paul Michel, Yossi Adi, Emmanuel Dupoux