SALSA: Speedy ASR-LLM Synchronous Aggregation

Harnessing pre-trained LLMs to improve ASR systems, particularly for low-resource languages, is now an emerging area of research. Existing methods range from using LLMs for ASR error correction to tightly coupled systems that replace the ASR decoder with the LLM. These approaches either increase decoding time or require expensive training of the cross-attention layers. We propose SALSA, which couples the decoder layers of the ASR to the LLM decoder, while synchronously advancing both decoders. Such coupling is performed with a simple projection of the last decoder state, and is thus significantly more training efficient than earlier approaches. A challenge of our proposed coupling is handling the mismatch between the tokenizers of the LLM and ASR systems. We handle this mismatch using cascading tokenization with respect to the LLM and ASR vocabularies. We evaluate SALSA on 8 low-resource languages in the FLEURS benchmark, yielding substantial WER reductions of up to 38%.

Soft Random Sampling: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Soft random sampling (SRS) is a simple yet effective approach for efficient training of large-scale deep neural networks when dealing with massive data. SRS selects a subset uniformly at random with replacement from the full data set in each epoch. In this paper, we conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of SRS. First, we analyze its sampling dynamics including data coverage and occupancy. Next, we investigate its convergence with non-convex objective functions and give the convergence rate. Finally, we provide its generalization performance. We empirically evaluate SRS for image recognition on CIFAR10 and automatic speech recognition on Librispeech and an in-house payload dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness. Compared to existing coreset-based data selection methods, SRS offers a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Especially on real-world industrial scale data sets, it is shown to be a powerful training strategy with significant speedup and competitive performance with almost no additional computing cost.

Improving RNN-Transducers with Acoustic LookAhead

RNN-Transducers (RNN-Ts) have gained widespread acceptance as an end-to-end model for speech to text conversion because of their high accuracy and streaming capabilities. A typical RNN-T independently encodes the input audio and the text context, and combines the two encodings by a thin joint network. While this architecture provides SOTA streaming accuracy, it also makes the model vulnerable to strong LM biasing which manifests as multi-step hallucination of text without acoustic evidence. In this paper we propose LookAhead that makes text representations more acoustically grounded by looking ahead into the future within the audio input. This technique yields a significant 5%-20% relative reduction in word error rate on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation sets.

Partitioned Gradient Matching-based Data Subset Selection for Compute-Efficient Robust ASR Training

Training state-of-the-art ASR systems such as RNN-T often has a high associated financial and environmental cost. Training with a subset of training data could mitigate this problem if the subset selected could achieve on-par performance with training with the entire dataset. Although there are many data subset selection(DSS) algorithms, direct application to the RNN-T is difficult, especially the DSS algorithms that are adaptive and use learning dynamics such as gradients, as RNN-T tend to have gradients with a significantly larger memory footprint. In this paper, we propose Partitioned Gradient Matching (PGM) a novel distributable DSS algorithm, suitable for massive datasets like those used to train RNN-T. Through extensive experiments on Librispeech 100H and Librispeech 960H, we show that PGM achieves between 3x to 6x speedup with only a very small accuracy degradation (under 1% absolute WER difference). In addition, we demonstrate similar results for PGM even in settings where the training data is corrupted with noise.

Adaptive Discounting of Implicit Language Models in RNN-Transducers

RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) models have become synonymous with streaming end-to-end ASR systems. While they perform competitively on a number of evaluation categories, rare words pose a serious challenge to RNN-T models. One main reason for the degradation in performance on rare words is that the language model (LM) internal to RNN-Ts can become overconfident and lead to hallucinated predictions that are acoustically inconsistent with the underlying speech. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight adaptive LM discounting technique AdaptLMD, that can be used with any RNN-T architecture without requiring any external resources or additional parameters. AdaptLMD uses a two-pronged approach: 1) Randomly mask the prediction network output to encourage the RNN-T to not be overly reliant on it's outputs. 2) Dynamically choose when to discount the implicit LM (ILM) based on rarity of recently predicted tokens and divergence between ILM and implicit acoustic model (IAM) scores. Comparing AdaptLMD to a competitive RNN-T baseline, we obtain up to 4% and 14% relative reductions in overall WER and rare word PER, respectively, on a conversational, code-mixed Hindi-English ASR task.

Representation based meta-learning for few-shot spoken intent recognition

Spoken intent detection has become a popular approach to interface with various smart devices with ease. However, such systems are limited to the preset list of intents-terms or commands, which restricts the quick customization of personal devices to new intents. This paper presents a few-shot spoken intent classification approach with task-agnostic representations via meta-learning paradigm. Specifically, we leverage the popular representation-based meta-learning learning to build a task-agnostic representation of utterances, that then use a linear classifier for prediction. We evaluate three such approaches on our novel experimental protocol developed on two popular spoken intent classification datasets: Google Commands and the Fluent Speech Commands dataset. For a 5-shot (1-shot) classification of novel classes, the proposed framework provides an average classification accuracy of 88.6% (76.3%) on the Google Commands dataset, and 78.5% (64.2%) on the Fluent Speech Commands dataset. The performance is comparable to traditionally supervised classification models with abundant training samples.

Multilingual and code-switching ASR challenges for low resource Indian languages

Recently, there is increasing interest in multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) where a speech recognition system caters to multiple low resource languages by taking advantage of low amounts of labeled corpora in multiple languages. With multilingualism becoming common in today's world, there has been increasing interest in code-switching ASR as well. In code-switching, multiple languages are freely interchanged within a single sentence or between sentences. The success of low-resource multilingual and code-switching ASR often depends on the variety of languages in terms of their acoustics, linguistic characteristics as well as the amount of data available and how these are carefully considered in building the ASR system. In this challenge, we would like to focus on building multilingual and code-switching ASR systems through two different subtasks related to a total of seven Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati and Bengali. For this purpose, we provide a total of ~600 hours of transcribed speech data, comprising train and test sets, in these languages including two code-switched language pairs, Hindi-English and Bengali-English. We also provide a baseline recipe for both the tasks with a WER of 30.73% and 32.45% on the test sets of multilingual and code-switching subtasks, respectively.

Unified Semantic Parsing with Weak Supervision

Semantic parsing over multiple knowledge bases enables a parser to exploit structural similarities of programs across the multiple domains. However, the fundamental challenge lies in obtaining high-quality annotations of (utterance, program) pairs across various domains needed for training such models. To overcome this, we propose a novel framework to build a unified multi-domain enabled semantic parser trained only with weak supervision (denotations). Weakly supervised training is particularly arduous as the program search space grows exponentially in a multi-domain setting. To solve this, we incorporate a multi-policy distillation mechanism in which we first train domain-specific semantic parsers (teachers) using weak supervision in the absence of the ground truth programs, followed by training a single unified parser (student) from the domain specific policies obtained from these teachers. The resultant semantic parser is not only compact but also generalizes better, and generates more accurate programs. It further does not require the user to provide a domain label while querying. On the standard Overnight dataset (containing multiple domains), we demonstrate that the proposed model improves performance by 20% in terms of denotation accuracy in comparison to baseline techniques.