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Whisper-Aware LLM: Self-Supervised Uncertainty Learning for Robust Whispered Speech Recognition

2026-08-11 12:02:55
Gaopeng Xu, Zhenyu Wang, Zheng Xue, Yinfeng Xia, Haitao Yao
arXiv_AI
             
Abstract

The signal ambiguity of whispered speech drives ASR systems toward two opposing failure modes: failing to capture whispered speech or hallucinatory transcription of noise. This paper introduces the Whisper-Aware LLM, a framework that teaches an Audio-LLM to perceive and react to this uncertainty. Our model develops an intrinsic self-awareness by learning to quantify the physical deficiencies of acoustic signals through targeted self-supervised tasks. This learned uncertainty is then operationalized via a novel Confidence-Fused Decoding mechanism, which provides both high-level instructions and frame-level attention modulation to the LLM decoder. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of this approach. The model sets a new state-of-the-art on whispered speech with a 17% relative CER reduction on AISHELL6-Whisper. At the same time, it directly addresses the reliability trade-off, with hallucination rates dropping from over 25% to 4.5%.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10836

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10836.pdf

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