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The paper investigates how post‑training compression techniques—such as pruning, quantization, and distillation—affect demographic fairness in Whisper speech‑recognition models. It finds that pruning and INT4 quantization significantly widen word‑error‑rate gaps between demographic groups, especially for Black/AA and Asian speakers, while distillation tends to reduce these gaps. The study introduces a temporal‑taxation metric to quantify the increased correction effort required for marginalized speakers after compression.
arXiv:2609.18533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit unequal error rates across speaker groups, motivating interventions on their internal representation...
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems exhibit unequal error rates across speaker groups, motivating interventions on their internal representations. We ask whether speaker-linked attributes that...
Pruning large pre-trained transformer-based ASR models such as OpenAI's Whisper has seen great adoption, as pruning the decoder led to significant end-to-end transcription speedups. For instance, the...
The paper introduces a method to prune six layers from the encoder of OpenAI’s Whisper ASR model, reducing the encoder stack by 18.5% without requiring custom inference code. Layers are selected based on their minimal impact on Word Error Rate when removed. After pruning, the model’s WER rises from 18.2% to 21.9%, but distillation with unlabeled monolingual speech data lowers it to 20.1%. "whyItMatters":"The approach offers a straightforward way to accelerate Whisper inference by simplifying the encoder while maintaining acceptable accuracy, and the released code and model enable immediate adoption by the community."
arXiv:2603. 05121v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech Large Language Models route speech encoder representations into an LLM decoder that typically accounts for over 90% of total parameters.