Papers › Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition with Policy Learning
Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition with Policy Learning
Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher
Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is widely used for maximum likelihood learning in end-to-end speech recognition models. However, there is usually a disparity between the negative maximum likelihood and the performance metric used in speech recognition, e.g., word error rate (WER). This results in a mismatch between the objective function and metric during training. We show that the above problem can be mitigated by jointly training with maximum likelihood and policy gradient. In particular, with policy learning we are able to directly optimize on the (otherwise non-differentiable) performance metric. We show that joint training improves relative performance by 4% to 13% for our end-to-end model as compared to the same model learned through maximum likelihood. The model achieves 5.53% WER on Wall Street Journal dataset, and 5.42% and 14.70% on Librispeech test-clean and test-other set, respectively.
Code
No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speech Recognition | LibriSpeech test-clean | CTC + policy learning | Word Error Rate (WER) | 5.42 | #58 of 64 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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