Speech_Recognition
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Why Do You Say It Like That? A Phoneme-Level Framework for Explainable Speech Deepfake Detection
2026-07-09 15:23:45Anna Taylor, Michele Panariello, Massimiliano Todisco, Chiara Galdi, Nicholas Evans, Driss MatroufAbstract
As the accuracy of speech deepfake detection improves with the use of self-supervised representations such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT, understanding why the speech is classified as bona fide or deepfake remains an open challenge. In pursuit of more trustworthy and interpretable artificial intelligence, we introduce a phoneme-level analysis framework that connects model predictions to measurable phonetic units. Our post-hoc explainability method is generally applicable to a variety of speech deepfake detection systems based on convolutional neural networks since it leverages Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping in conjunction with speech recognition to generate saliency maps aligned with phonemes and pauses. This pipeline reveals statistically significant attack- and speaker-dependent phonetic cues associated with spoofed speech in terms that humans can understand. Experiments using ASVspoof 5 show comparable detection performance to similar architectures while providing linguistic interpretations across speakers and spoofing conditions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08586
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On the Role of Conversational Timing in Synthetic Training Data for ASR
2026-07-09 11:40:33M\'at\'e Gedeon, P\'eter MihajlikAbstract
Synthetic multi-speaker conversations are widely used to train conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it remains unclear which timing properties make simulated data most useful. This paper studies conversational timing as a controllable training variable rather than merely as a corpus statistic to be reproduced. We parameterize pause and overlap timing distributions with an exponential-tilting family estimated from multiple conversational corpora, and then explore the resulting four-dimensional parameter space with Latin hypercube sampling and multi-objective Bayesian optimization. Each sampled timing configuration is used to generate simulated training conversations, train an ASR system, and evaluate concatenated-permutation word and character error rates (cpWER and cpCER) on a Hungarian dialogue corpus. The results show that downstream ASR behavior is explained more directly by induced timing statistics than by raw simulator coordinates or corpus proximity. In particular, higher overlap exposure is associated with lower cpWER, whereas longer and more variable gaps are associated with higher cpWER; cpCER follows the same trend, but with weaker statistical support. Bayesian optimization yields modest aggregate improvements, but its main value is analytical: it produces controlled timing interventions that reveal an overlap--gap trade-off in simulated conversational training data. These findings suggest that realistic simulation should be complemented by task-relevant diagnostics of overlap, gap, and timing-variability profiles.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08371
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Best-of-$N$ TTS Evaluation is Confounded by ASR Family Alignment
2026-07-09 09:01:03Taehyung Yu, Seongjae KangAbstract
Best-of-$N$ (BoN) inference improves content consistency in zero-shot text-to-speech by selecting from $N$ candidates with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) verifier. We identify an underexplored evaluation confound: a verifier's apparent quality depends strongly on which ASR family judges it. On LibriSpeech-PC test-clean~\citep{librispeechpc} with F5-TTS~\citep{f5tts}, verifier rankings reverse across Whisper, wav2vec~2.0, and HuBERT evaluators, and same-family verifier-evaluator pairs recover 2-3$\times$ more oracle headroom than cross-family pairs despite near-identical representations (linear CKA $0.978$) -- a pattern consistent with identity- or lineage-level coupling rather than representational overlap. We propose two \textbf{cross-family rank ensembles} (rank-averaging and conjunctive max-rank) that attain the lowest mean WER across three independent evaluators -- $1.61\%$ at $N{=}10$ ($-12\%$ relative to F5-TTS) -- with no measurable degradation under automatic SIM-o/UTMOS metrics; the best single verifier drives WER from $2.06\%$ to $1.72\%$ ($-16.5\%$) under the official F5-TTS evaluator. We recommend cross-evaluator triangulation as default reporting practice.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08256
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TVTA: Trajectory-Aware Viseme-Guided Temporal Aggregation for Event-Based Lip Reading
2026-07-09 08:33:21Jingrong Zheng, Hongwei Ren, Xiangqian WuAbstract
Event-based lip reading has recently emerged as a promising direction for visual speech recognition, benefiting from the high temporal resolution and motion sensitivity of event cameras. However, existing methods typically perform spatial compression before sufficient temporal modeling, which may suppress sparse and localized motion trajectories that are crucial for distinguishing similar lip movements. Moreover, most current approaches optimize temporal representations mainly at the word-classification level, leaving the underlying articulatory structure weakly constrained. To address these limitations, we propose a temporally enhanced framework for event-based lip reading. First, we introduce Trajectory-Aware Differential Aggregation (TDA), which performs local temporal modeling at each spatial location before adaptive spatial aggregation. Second, we propose Viseme-Guided Aggregation (VGA), a unified temporal module composed of a CTC decoder and a viseme-guided gated aggregation branch, which injects viseme-aware sequence supervision and improves final temporal aggregation for word recognition. Third, we incorporate an EMA teacher--student training strategy to enhance robustness under strong event perturbations. Experiments on the DVS-Lip benchmark verify the effectiveness of the proposed design, and extensive ablation studies further validate the contributions of TDA, VGA, and teacher--student consistency. Qualitative decoding results also demonstrate that the proposed CTC-based temporal modeling learns meaningful viseme-aware structure from event streams.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08236
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COALA: Robust Contextualized Speech-augmented Language Modeling for ASR via Contrastive Regularizer and Biasing Score Estimation
2026-07-09 05:26:22Jhih-Rong Guo, Bi-Cheng Yan, Tien-Hong Lo, Berlin ChenAbstract
Contextual biasing seeks to integrate external knowledge into automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to accurately recognize domain-specific entities. In this paper, we propose COALA (Contextualized ASR Leveraging Biasing Scoring), a robust framework designed to enhance speech-augmented language models (SLMs) in complex multi-entity scenarios. Considering the inherent context-window limitations of SLMs, identifying relevant target entities from a large-scale biasing list is crucial for effective recognition. To this end, COALA maps SLM latent representations into a specialized discriminative space to quantify the matching intensity between audio segments and candidate entities. Furthermore, we address the training collapse in prior study when handling multi-target utterances-where multiple rare words co-occur. Experimental results on the LibriSpeech benchmark demonstrate that COALA consistently achieves superior contextual biasing performance across various biasing list scales.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08117
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VSRo-200: A Romanian Visual Speech Recognition Dataset for Studying Supervision and Multimodal Robustness
2026-07-09 04:54:53Iulia-Maria Udrea, Alexandra Diaconu, Bogdan AlexeAbstract
We introduce VSRo-200, the first large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition (lip reading) in Romanian, comprising 200 hours of real-world podcast videos. All samples are annotated with pseudo-labels generated by a fine-tuned Romanian ASR model, while a subset of 100 hours is additionally transcribed by humans, enabling controlled analysis of supervision quality under a unified framework. Building on this dataset, we establish a benchmark for visual speech recognition in low-resource settings. We systematically study the impact of supervision quality, showing that while human annotations provide better performance at fixed data scales, pseudo-labels enable continued improvements through scalability. We further evaluate robustness under domain shift using curated out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets, and analyze audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) under noisy conditions, where multimodal fusion significantly improves robustness compared to audio-only models. Finally, we demonstrate that representations learned on VSRo-200 transfer effectively to the LRRo benchmark for isolated word recognition, substantially outperforming previously reported results. Overall, VSRo-200 provides a new testbed for studying supervision, domain generalization, and multimodal fusion in low-resource visual speech recognition.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08112
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From Sinhala to Dhivehi: Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Speech Recognition
2026-07-07 13:57:54Lukmal Ilyas, Nevidu JayatillekeAbstract
Dhivehi, the national language of the Maldives, is currently under-resourced for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and other NLP tasks. This study investigates whether cross-lingual transfer learning from Sinhala, a linguistically related, relatively well-resourced Insular Indo-Aryan language, can improve Dhivehi ASR. We conduct seventeen experiments across five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. However, the adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are equally critical for a successful transfer learning experiment. We conduct seventeen controlled experiments spanning five transfer learning paradigms: Dhivehi-only baselines, sequential fine-tuning, multilingual fine-tuning, continual pre-training, and a control experiment using Turkish as an unrelated language. The strongest system, continual pre-training on Sinhala followed by fine-tuning on Dhivehi with KenLM, achieves 12.89% WER and 2.70% CER, outperforming the Dhivehi-only baseline by 13.50% WER and 3.02% CER. The Turkish control experiment confirms that observed improvements stem from linguistic relatedness; adaptation strategy and decoding configuration are also critical.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06289
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Flow Matching-Based Speech Source Separation with Best-of-N Biometric Sampling
2026-07-07 10:00:23Anastasia Zorkina, Alexandr Anikin, Nikita Khmelev, Anastasiya Korenevskaya, Sergey Novoselov, Vladimir Volokhov, Maxim Korenevsky, Yuriy MatveevAbstract
Single-channel speech separation remains challenging for real-world deployment due to source permutation ambiguity, sampling variability of generative models, and the difficulty of processing long recordings with chunk-wise inference. We address these issues with a conditional flow-matching-based method that produces an ordered two-source output conditioned on the mixture. A frozen speaker encoder defines the source order during training and is reused at inference for biometric best-of-$N$ candidate selection and chunk-level channel alignment. We evaluate separation quality on Libri2Mix benchmark using SI-SDR, PESQ, and ESTOI, and measure downstream impact using cpWER for automatic speech recognition and EER for speaker verification. The results show that the proposed Transformer U-Net variant is competitive with strong baselines in objective separation metrics and achieves the lowest downstream automatic speech recognition and speaker verification error rates in all evaluated settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06088
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Audio Sentiment Analysis via Distillation and Cross-Modal Integration of Generated Multilingual Transcripts
2026-07-07 06:48:23Andrei-George Durdun, Victor Constantinescu, Radu Tudor IonescuAbstract
Automatically recognizing the sentiment, positive or negative, from speech is a challenging task, requiring both the analysis of vocal inflections and the interpretation of uttered words. Recent solutions rely on audio foundation models to solve the task, but it remains unclear if such models can take all aspects into account. To this end, we propose a multimodal solution that integrates audio and text information via cross-modal transformers, where text transcripts are automatically generated via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool. Moreover, we create multiple text modalities by automatically translating the transcripts into multiple languages via machine translation tools. Audio and multilingual text features are combined via a cascaded architecture comprising cross-modal transformer blocks that integrate modalities one by one. We further distill knowledge from the multimodal model, called teacher, into a unimodal (audio only) model, called student. We conduct experiments on a large-scale dataset, demonstrating that the automatically generated textual information can bring significant performance boosts in multimodal sentiment polarity classification. Our ablation study confirms that both automatic transcripts and automatic translations are helpful. Moreover, we show that the audio-only model can be enhanced via distillation, boosting performance without any computational overhead during inference. To reproduce the reported results, we publicly release our code at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06611
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Revisiting the Relation Between Language Model Perplexity and ASR Word Error Rate for Modern End-to-End Speech Recognition
2026-07-06 20:15:49Mohammad Zeineldeen, Albert Zeyer, Haoran Zhang, Robin Schmitt, Ralf Schl\"uter, Hermann NeyAbstract
Language model (LM) perplexity (PPL) has historically been used as a proxy for automatic speech recognition (ASR) word error rate (WER), with prior work reporting an approximately linear relation in log-log space. Modern end-to-end ASR systems challenge this assumption because they already contain internal language modeling capacity, are often evaluated without external language models, and can now be combined with neural LMs and large language models (LLMs) through different recognition strategies. This paper revisits the relation between PPL and WER for modern ASR systems. We study whether external LMs still improve current end-to-end ASR systems, whether the PPL-WER relation remains linear in log-log space, how encoder context length affects this relation, and how LLM perplexities fit into the trend observed for standard neural LMs. We further investigate internal language modeling (ILM) in attention-based encoder-decoder systems and show that ILM subtraction changes the observed PPL-WER relation, indicating that the decoder's internal LM must be considered when interpreting the effect of external LM quality.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05612
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Progressive Refinement: An Iterative Pseudo-Labeling Approach for Mandarin-English Code-Switching ASR
2026-07-06 15:39:30Qu Yang, Cakra Wardhana, Tim NgAbstract
Code-switching (CS), alternating languages within the same utterance, poses significant challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to limited CS training data. This paper applies an iterative pseudo-labeling training approach to CS-ASR for the first time, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging unlabeled data to improve CS-ASR performance. The approach comprises three phases: pseudo-label generation, two-stage bilingual model training, and iterative improvements. It begins by generating pseudo-labels from a large unlabeled corpus, creating a semi-supervised dataset. This dataset supports a two-stage training framework where the model is pre-trained and then fine-tuned on supervised CS data. Iterative refinements further enhance the model's accuracy in handling complex CS scenarios. Our approach significantly advances CS-ASR systems, achieving notable Mix Error Rate (MER) reductions on SEAME's devman (6.35%) and devsge (8.29%) subsets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05224
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Unified Audio Intelligence Without Regressing on Text Intelligence
2026-07-06 15:11:57Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Boxin Wang, Zihan Liu, Sungwon Kim, Yang Chen, Arushi Goel, Rajarshi Roy, Wenliang Dai, Zhuolin Yang, Yangyi Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Sreyan Ghosh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Andrew Tao, Jonathan Raiman, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei PingAbstract
Audio intelligence involves understanding, reasoning about, and generating both audio and speech. In this work, we introduce Nemotron-Labs-Audex-30B-A3B (Audex), a unified audio-text LLM built on Nemotron-Cascade-2-30B-A3B, a strong text-only MoE LLM. Audex adopts a simple unified design with a single Transformer decoder: audio inputs are encoded and projected into the text embedding space, while text tokens and quantized audio output tokens are treated uniformly during generation. This architecture enables strong audio-text fusion, seamless multimodal generation, and compatibility with standard LLM training and inference infrastructure. For training, we meticulously curate audio-text datasets comprising 157.4B audio tokens and 320.5B text tokens. We apply multi-stage supervised training on these datasets, followed by text-only Cascade RL and multi-domain on-policy distillation. Audex delivers state-of-the-art audio understanding, speech recognition and translation, text-to-speech, audio generation, and speech-to-speech generation, while preserving very compelling reasoning, alignment, knowledge, long-context, and agentic capabilities of its text-only LLM backbone with marginal or no regression. We release the model checkpoints to facilitate open research.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05196
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Evaluating the Effect of Linguistic Relatedness on Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition
2026-07-06 08:49:02Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy BuzaabaAbstract
Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage linguistic relatedness to enhance cross-lingual transfer from a related auxiliary language to the low-resource target by sequentially adapting on both. Although this strategy has shown meaningful improvements in small ASR models, its effectiveness in large ASR remains unclear. We extend this framework to large multilingual ASR through a systematic controlled experimental design spanning six factors, two Africa-centric corpora, and four large ASR models, isolating whether linguistic relatedness reliably predicts cross-lingual transfer gains in this setting. Across all conditions, pre-adaptation on related auxiliary languages yields no practically meaningful transfer improvements given minimal target-language data, suggesting that linguistic relatedness alone may not reliably predict cross-lingual transfer gains in large multilingual ASR, or constitute an effective strategy for extending such models to low-resource languages.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04814
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S-DiverSe: Spanish Diverse Speech
2026-07-03 11:23:43Fernando L\'opez, Fernando Iba\~nez, Ana Mart\'inez, Iv\'an Alonso, Pablo G\'omez, Santosh Kesiraju, Jordi LuqueAbstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced remarkably for standard speech, yet speech affected by neurological conditions remains a challenge. We present S-DiverSe (Spanish Diverse Speech), a corpus of 3.2 hours of in-the-wild Spanish speech from 22 speakers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and stroke. The dataset contains 444 manually transcribed audio segments with metadata on speaker sex, disease type, and intelligibility. S-DiverSe is designed to support ASR evaluation and development for neurologically affected Spanish speech. We describe the dataset, analyze its composition, and report baseline ASR results alongside initial adaptation experiments. Our findings reveal that heuristic text post-processing is more robust than fine-tuning for out-of-domain neurological Spanish speech. This underscores the need for dedicated in-the-wild Spanish benchmarks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03207
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Jointly Improving Dialect Identification and ASR in Indian Languages using Multimodal Feature Fusion
2026-07-03 01:53:05Saurabh Kumar, Amartyaveer, Prasanta Kumar GhoshAbstract
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Dialect Identification (DID) are crucial for Indian languages, many of which are low-resource and exhibit significant dialectal differences. Existing methods often optimize ASR or DID individually, resulting in performance trade-offs. In this work, we propose a multimodal framework that jointly improves ASR and DID. Our method employs a Bottleneck Encoder to extract dialectal features from Conformer-based speech representations and a RoBERTa encoder to process ASR-generated CTC embeddings. A gating mechanism merges these features, followed by an attention encoder to refine the representations. The learned embeddings are concatenated with Conformer outputs to enhance ASR features. Evaluated on eight Indian languages with thirty-three dialects, our method achieves an average DID accuracy of 81.63% and average CER and WER of 4.65% and 17.73%, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of our method for joint ASR-DID modeling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02862
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Rethinking Speech-LLM Integration for ASR: Effective Joint Speech-Text Training by Interleaving
2026-07-02 05:42:01Ruchao Fan, Yiming Wang, Rui Zhao, Liliang Ren, Keqi Deng, Xiaoyang Chen, Ali Zare, Bo Ren, Yuxuan Hu, Junkun Chen, Yan Huang, Yelong Shen, Jinyu LiAbstract
Speech-LLM integration has shown promising results by leveraging extensive textual pretraining, yet its specific benefits for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain unclear. We observe that as supervised ASR training data increases, the contribution of LLM priors becomes less evident, and simple speech-text joint training under-utilizes textual knowledge. We therefore propose Joint Speech-Text Interleaved Pretraining (JSTIP), an ASR-oriented pretraining strategy that constructs word-level and segment-level interleaved speech-text sequences within aligned pairs for speech-LLM architectures that accept continuous inputs. Experiments on 38k hours of ASR data show consistent entity accuracy improvement compared to ASR-only and joint speech-text training baselines. JSTIP achieves on-par entity recognition performance using domain transcription text compared to synthetic speech-text pairs, simplifying domain adaptation. Benefiting from textual pretraining and domain text data, JSTIP is competitive with open-source ASR and Speech-LLM systems in medical entity recognition. The zero-shot speech question answering behaviors further suggest that interleaving reduces the speech-text modality gap and preserves the LLM generative prior, which is likely the reason for the entity improvements on the ASR task.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01733
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H-SAGE: Holistic Speaker-Aware Guided Experts for MoE-based Multi-Talker ASR
2026-07-02 00:49:40Yujie Guo, Jiaming Zhou, Yuhang Jia, Yang chen, Yong QinAbstract
Multi-talker Automatic Speech Recognition (MTASR) faces significant challenges in accurately transcribing overlapping speech, particularly under complex high-overlap conditions. While recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches have shown promise, they typically rely on frame-independent routing that leads to temporal myopia, and depend solely on the downstream ASR objective, which results in implicit and ungrounded representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose Holistic Speaker-Aware Guided Experts (H-SAGE) for MoE-based MTASR. Specifically, we introduce a Speaker-Aware Global Encoder to capture long-term dependencies, supervised by an auxiliary Overlap-Aware Loss that explicitly guides the model to discern acoustic states. Furthermore, we design a Holistic Gating Mechanism to arbitrate expert selection by jointly evaluating global context and local details. Experiments on LibriSpeechMix demonstrate that H-SAGE achieves consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly in complex scenarios, validating that explicit acoustic guidance effectively enhances expert collaboration. Our code can be found at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01566
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From Monolingual to Multilingual: Evaluating Mamba for ASR in South African Languages
2026-07-01 22:01:29Jesujoba O. Alabi, Julian Herreilers, Badr M. Abdullah, Dietrich KlakowAbstract
Recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) have explored different sequence models, including Conformer-based models and newer state space models such as Mamba. Although prior work has evaluated these architectures in multiple languages, their effectiveness in African languages remains underexplored. In this work, we evaluate Mamba for ASR on seven South African languages. In monolingual experiments, each model is trained on 50 hours of speech per language, and we compare Mamba to a Conformer baseline of similar parameter scale. Mamba achieves similar recognition accuracy to Conformer while using fewer computational resources and training faster. We further evaluate generalization in this setting and find that both models struggle to generalize to speech that is much longer than what they were trained on. We then study multilingual ASR using Mamba models, where the baseline is pooling all languages together. On top of this, we tested three extensions: training with language-family information by adding both language and language-family embeddings as biases to the downsampled acoustic representations, and multitask learning with a CTC ASR objective and a language identification (LID) head. We find that multilingual training consistently improves performance over monolingual training. However, adding explicit language information does not improve in-domain performance but does improve cross-corpus robustness. We conducted ablation studies in low-resource multilingual settings using 5-hour and 10-hour per-language training data, where we observed gains from using language embeddings and further demonstrated that removing or altering them hurt model performance. Lastly, we analysed these embeddings and find that they do not capture linguistic similarity in a typological sense, but instead act as task-specific control vectors.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01502
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From Technical Metrics to User Perception: A User Study of a Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction System for Object Detection and Grasping
2026-07-01 07:19:00Jian Song, Tian Zi, Shen GuantingAbstract
Improvements in the technical performance of human--robot interaction (HRI) systems do not automatically translate into differences that human users can detect during live interaction. This paper investigates whether a 15 percentage point gain in end-to-end task success (from 75% in a multimodal baseline system to 90% in an improved configuration identified through a prior ablation study) is sufficient to produce consistent and measurable differences in user perception. The baseline system combines Whisper for speech recognition, Florence-2 for open-vocabulary object detection, LLaMA 3.1 for action extraction, and an interval Type-2 fuzzy logic controller for motion execution. The improved configuration replaces the perception and language modules with Grounding DINO + SAM and Qwen 3.5 9B, respectively, while retaining the same controller. A within-subject user study with 24 participants compared both systems on the same tabletop object-grasping task. After interacting with each configuration, participants rated perceived speed, reliability, and overall competence and fluency on a 7-point Likert scale. Results show that 17 out of 24 participants (70.83%) preferred the improved system (exact binomial test, p = 0.043, h = 0.43), and all three perceptual constructs were rated significantly higher for the improved configuration after Holm correction, with large to very large effect sizes (p < 0.001). These findings confirm that the identified technical improvements are perceptible to users in direct interaction and underscore the importance of complementing benchmark evaluation with user-centred evidence when assessing robotic manipulation pipelines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00530
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Adapting Foundation ASR Models to Dysarthric Speech: A Case Study
2026-06-30 14:23:49Christian Huber, Laura Kernahan, Alexander WaibelAbstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often perform poorly in dysarthric speech, limiting their usefulness to affected speakers in everyday communication. This paper presents a personalized ASR system for a dysarthric speaker, built by adapting a foundation ASR model to speaker-specific data. Using the TEQST tool, we collected 92 hours of read speech and later added 8.8 hours of user corrections gathered through a deployed mobile application. Starting from Whisper, fine-tuning reduced word error rate to 15.8% with only 1.4 hours of adaptation data, reached 10.7% with 22.5 hours, and achieved the best result of 9.7% when using all available data including the corrections. Using LoRA adaptation and/or Qwen3-ASR as foundation model performed worse in this setting. The results show that personalized fine-tuning can make foundation ASR models substantially more effective for dysarthric speech and suitable for practical deployment.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31722
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