arXiv Computation and Language By Carlos Carvalho, Francisco Teixeira, Thomas Rolland, Alberto Abad

Exploring the potential and limitations of Model Merging for Multi-Domain Adaptation in ASR

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The paper investigates model merging as a scalable alternative to multi-task training for multi-domain automatic speech recognition (ASR). It benchmarks 11 merging algorithms across 10 European Portuguese domains, assessing in‑domain accuracy, robustness to distribution shift, and performance on English and multilingual data. The authors introduce BoostedTSV‑M, a new merging method that mitigates rank collapse through singular‑value boosting, achieving better performance than full fine‑tuning while maintaining out‑of‑distribution generalisation in a single model.

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