Papers › Improving CTC-based speech recognition via knowledge transferring from pre-trained...

Improving CTC-based speech recognition via knowledge transferring from pre-trained language models

22 Feb 2022arXiv:2203.03582archive 2025-07-28

Keqi Deng, Songjun Cao, Yike Zhang, Long Ma, Gaofeng Cheng, Ji Xu, Pengyuan Zhang

Recently, end-to-end automatic speech recognition models based on connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have achieved impressive results, especially when fine-tuned from wav2vec2.0 models. Due to the conditional independence assumption, CTC-based models are always weaker than attention-based encoder-decoder models and require the assistance of external language models (LMs). To solve this issue, we propose two knowledge transferring methods that leverage pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT2, to improve CTC-based models. The first method is based on representation learning, in which the CTC-based models use the representation produced by BERT as an auxiliary learning target. The second method is based on joint classification learning, which combines GPT2 for text modeling with a hybrid CTC/attention architecture. Experiment on AISHELL-1 corpus yields a character error rate (CER) of 4.2% on the test set. When compared to the vanilla CTC-based models fine-tuned from the wav2vec2.0 models, our knowledge transferring method reduces CER by 16.1% relatively without external LMs.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Vladimetr/ASR-Knowledge-Transferring mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Automatic Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Auxiliary LearningDecoderRepresentation LearningSpeech Recognitionspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections