arXiv AI
Sep 7

Reducing Hallucinated Transcripts in Whisper via Hallucination Space Projection

The paper introduces a training‑free, inference‑time technique to curb hallucinated transcripts in Whisper by projecting decoder activations away from a low‑rank hallucination subspace derived from non‑speech data. Two variants are tested: an always‑on projection that dramatically lowers hallucination rates on non‑speech benchmarks, and a gated version that applies the projection only when non‑speech is predicted, achieving a smaller but still significant reduction. On LibriSpeech, the gated method slightly increases word error rate but keeps false‑rejection rates low, demonstrating a controllable trade‑off between hallucination suppression and recognition accuracy.

By Maryam Abbasihafshejani, Murtuza Jadliwala
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models

The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.

By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj