4arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·
REDDIT framework corrects timestamp drift in autoregressive ASR without catastrophic forgetting
A new arXiv paper introduces REDDIT (Replay-based Distribution EDITing), a two-stage post-training framework that corrects timestamp drift in autoregressive ASR systems like Whisper across long non-speech spans. The method updates only 1.6% of model parameters and constructs correction supervision without human annotations, using VAD-trimmed speech with inserted non-speech gaps. On Whisper-tiny, long-gap mIoU improves from 38.7% to 95.0% and out-of-domain alignment error drops from 2752 ms to 223 ms, while preserving transcription quality that ordinary SFT decoder tuning catastrophically degrades.
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Personalized fine-tuning of Whisper achieves 9.7% WER on dysarthric speech
Researchers adapted Whisper to a single dysarthric speaker using up to 100.8 hours of read speech and user corrections collected via a mobile app, reducing word error rate from a high baseline to 9.7%. Fine-tuning outperformed LoRA adaptation and the Qwen3-ASR foundation model in this personalized setting. The study demonstrates that speaker-specific fine-tuning of foundation ASR models can reach practical deployment quality for dysarthric users.
Continual learning approach for disfluency-aware ASR with explicit disfluency tokens
A new arXiv preprint addresses the challenge of transcribing disfluent speech (hesitations, repetitions, fillers) in ASR systems, which typically omit such markers causing information loss. The authors introduce explicit disfluency tokens into a pretrained ASR model and apply continual learning to adapt across datasets with varying disfluency distributions while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. The work identifies a trade-off between disfluency marker learning and general ASR performance, and finds a consistent cross-attention head mechanism shared across continual learning methods.
ASRD: Training-free anchor-guided revocable decoding for diffusion LLMs improves accuracy and throughput
A new arXiv preprint introduces ASRD (Anchor Supervised Revocable Decoding), a training-free framework for improving decoding quality in diffusion large language models. The method addresses error propagation and local error reinforcement in revocable decoding by separating trusted 'anchor tokens' (identified via temporal consistency) from uncertain candidates, then applying anchor-guided generation and anchor-perturbed verification. Experiments on math and coding benchmarks show up to 6.4% accuracy improvement and 7.2× inference throughput gains over remasking baselines.
Controlled ablation reveals training artifact behind low frame rate degradation in neural audio codecs
A new arXiv preprint investigates why neural audio codecs degrade sharply at low frame rates (≤6.25 Hz), a property relevant to autoregressive speech synthesis where generation cost scales with sequence length. The authors reproduce a previously reported quality cliff at 6.25 Hz and show it stems from a suboptimal training configuration—fixed clip duration starves the decoder of inter-token context at low frame rates—rather than fundamental phonemic or codebook limits. After correcting the training setup, word error rate degrades smoothly down to 1.6 Hz, suggesting low frame rate codecs are more practically accessible than prior work implied.
Fine-Tune Whisper For Multilingual ASR with 🤗 Transformers
This Hugging Face blog post provides a practical guide for fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper model for multilingual automatic speech recognition using the Transformers library. It covers dataset preparation, training configuration, and evaluation using the Word Error Rate metric. The post targets practitioners seeking to adapt Whisper to low-resource or domain-specific languages.
Case study compares human and ASR system performance on Dutch dysarthric speech recognition
A new arXiv preprint compares human listeners against three off-the-shelf ASR systems (Whisper-large-V3, Google Chirp 3, and Omnilingual) on recognizing continuous Dutch speech from a single speaker with severe dysarthria. Both humans and ASR systems exceeded 70% WER on average, confirming the extreme difficulty of dysarthric speech recognition. Fine-tuning on dysarthric speech substantially reduced WER, with personalized models outperforming human listeners, though WER remained above 23%. The study highlights the need for personalized ASR approaches for dysarthric speakers.
SARDI: Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models using lookahead tokens
Researchers introduce SARDI, a training-free RAG framework for discrete diffusion language models that repurposes discarded low-confidence tokens during denoising as lookahead signals to guide retrieval before output is finalized. The method is retriever-agnostic and applicable to any reasoning-capable discrete diffusion LM. Evaluated across five multi-hop QA benchmarks, SARDI outperforms training-free diffusion and autoregressive retrieval baselines at up to 8x higher throughput.
DirectAudioEdit: Training-free, inversion-free text-guided audio editing via diffusion prediction contrast
Researchers introduce DirectAudioEdit, the first training-free and inversion-free method for text-guided audio editing using diffusion denoising dynamics. The approach constructs a source-to-target editing path without requiring DDPM inversion, reducing macro-averaged FAD and KL divergence by ~16% compared to inversion-based baselines while achieving up to 64.5% speedup. Experiments span music and event-level benchmarks across two backbone architectures.