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This empirical study addresses the critical challenge of adapting Automatic Speech Recognition models for children without degrading performance on adult speech, a key issue in inclusive AI deployment. The research evaluates various fine-tuning strategies across Arabic and English datasets, demonstrating that weight-space merging techniques like LERP and TIES effectively balance child adaptation gains with adult retention. For practitioners building accessible voice interfaces, the findings highlight bilingual adaptation as a more stable approach than language-specific tuning when managing this specific trade-off.
Child ASR Adaptation with Adult Retention: An Empirical Study
arXiv:2610.08827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often underperform for children and non-native speakers, while adapting adult ASR models to child speech can cause adult-speech forgetting. We study child ASR adaptation with adult retention across Arabic and English. We compare full fine-tuning, LoRA, and post-hoc weight-space merging across encoder--decoder, encoder--CTC, and AudioLLM-based ASR systems. Experiments use Arabic native and non-native child speech, English MyST child speech, and adult benchmarks from MGB-2 and LibriSpeech test-clean. We evaluate recognition quality with WER and quantify the adaptation--retention trade-off using Retention Index, Child Adaptation Gain, and Adaptation Recovery. Results show that child adaptation is necessary, especially for non-native Arabic and English child speech, but direct adaptation often reduces adult ASR performance. Bilingual adaptation is more stable than language-specific adaptation. Weight-space merging often improves the trade-off, especially for encoder--CTC, Whisper, and AudioLLM-based ASR, with LERP favoring adult retention and TIES recovering stronger child gains. For the encoder--decoder model, direct bilingual fine-tuning remains strongest in raw WER.\footnote{Code, and models are available at https://github.com/qcri/Child-ASR-Adaptation.
Abstract:Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often underperform for children and non-native speakers, while adapting adult ASR models to child speech can cause adult-speech forgetting. We study child ASR adaptation with adult retention across Arabic and English. We compare full fine-tuning, LoRA, and post-hoc weight-space merging across encoder--decoder, encoder--CTC, and AudioLLM-based ASR systems. Experiments use Arabic native and non-native child speech, English MyST child speech, and adult benchmarks from MGB-2 and LibriSpeech test-clean. We evaluate recognition quality with WER and quantify the adaptation--retention trade-off using Retention Index, Child Adaptation Gain, and Adaptation Recovery. Results show that child adaptation is necessary, especially for non-native Arabic and English child speech, but direct adaptation often reduces adult ASR performance. Bilingual adaptation is more stable than language-specific adaptation. Weight-space merging often improves the trade-off, especially for encoder--CTC, Whisper, and AudioLLM-based ASR, with LERP favoring adult retention and TIES recovering stronger child gains. For the encoder--decoder model, direct bilingual fine-tuning remains strongest in raw WER.\footnote{Code, and models are available at this https URL.
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Sound (cs.SD); Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)
arXiv:2610.08827 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2610.08827v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08827 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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