Vividh-ASR: A Complexity-Tiered Benchmark and Optimization Dynamics for Robust Indic Speech Recognition
Authors: Kush Juvekar, Kavya Manohar, Aditya Srinivas Menon et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 13087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning multilingual ASR models like Whisper for low-resource languages often improves read speech but degrades spontaneous audio performance, a phenomenon we term studio-bias.
Relevance
Read next because Vividh-ASR: A Complexity-Tiered Benchmark and Optimization Dynamics for Robust Indic Speech Recognition overlaps with clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Coupling evil personas with wrong answers fails to protect Qwen2.5-7B from EM-induced alignment collapse — and the apparent capability ordering across coupling conditions is mostly eval contamination (LOW confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)". Matching terms: code, source, training, rate, trained, language, model, once. Source: arxiv cs.CL (NLP).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)": this item discusses bias, benchmark.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.13087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning multilingual ASR models like Whisper for low-resource languages often improves read speech but degrades spontaneous audio performance, a phenomenon we term studio-bias. To diagnose this mismatch, we introduce Vividh-ASR, a complexity-stratified benchmark for Hindi and Malayalam across four tiers: studio, broadcast, spontaneous, and synthetic noise. Through a controlled study of learning-rate timing and curriculum ordering, we find that early large parameter updates improve global WER by 12 absolute points, while a hard-to-easy curriculum adds gains for spontaneous speech. These findings motivate reverse multi-stage fine-tuning (R-MFT), a training recipe that enables a parameter-efficient 244M Whisper model to match or exceed conventionally fine-tuned 769M counterparts. Representational analysis via CKA and SVD reveals effective schedules concentrate adaptation in the decoder, preserving the pre-trained encoder's acoustic geometry. We release the benchmark and models.