{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dicow-diarization-conditioned-whisper-for","title":"DiCoW: Diarization-Conditioned Whisper for Target Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition","arxiv_id":"2501.00114","date":"2024-12-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alexander Polok","Dominik Klement","Martin Kocour","Jiangyu Han","Federico Landini","Bolaji Yusuf","Matthew Wiesner","Sanjeev Khudanpur","Jan Černocký","Lukáš Burget"],"abstract":"Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multi-speaker environments remains a significant challenge, particularly when systems conditioned on speaker embeddings fail to generalize to unseen speakers. In this work, we propose Diarization-Conditioned Whisper (DiCoW), a novel approach to target-speaker ASR that leverages speaker diarization outputs as conditioning information. DiCoW extends the pre-trained Whisper model by integrating diarization labels directly, eliminating reliance on speaker embeddings and reducing the need for extensive speaker-specific training data. Our method introduces frame-level diarization-dependent transformations (FDDT) and query-key biasing (QKb) techniques to refine the model's focus on target speakers while effectively handling overlapping speech. By leveraging diarization outputs as conditioning signals, DiCoW simplifies the workflow for multi-speaker ASR, improves generalization to unseen speakers and enables more reliable transcription in real-world multi-speaker recordings. Additionally, we explore the integration of a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) head to Whisper and demonstrate its ability to improve transcription efficiency through hybrid decoding. Notably, we show that our approach is not limited to Whisper; it also provides similar benefits when applied to the Branchformer model. We validate DiCoW on real-world datasets, including AMI and NOTSOFAR-1 from CHiME-8 challenge, as well as synthetic benchmarks such as Libri2Mix and LibriCSS, enabling direct comparisons with previous methods. Results demonstrate that DiCoW enhances the model's target-speaker ASR capabilities while maintaining Whisper's accuracy and robustness on single-speaker data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.00114v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00114v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dicow-diarization-conditioned-whisper-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/BUTSpeechFIT/TS-ASR-Whisper","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)"},{"task_slug":"speaker-diarization","task_name":"Speaker Diarization"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speaker-diarization","task_name":"speaker-diarization"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}