Cited by 68Speech Recognition and SynthesisMusic and Audio ProcessingSpeech and Audio Processing

Whisper-AT: Noise-Robust Automatic Speech Recognizers are Also Strong General Audio Event Taggers

Open access
Gong, Yuan, Khurana, Sameer, Karlinsky, Leonid, Glass, James·2023·INTERSPEECH 2023

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on Whisper, a recent automatic speech recognition model trained with a massive 680k hour labeled speech corpus recorded in diverse conditions. We first show an interesting finding that while Whisper is very robust against real-world background sounds (e.g., music), its audio representation is actually not noise-invariant, but is instead highly correlated to non-speech sounds, indicating that Whisper recognizes speech conditioned on the noise type. With this finding, we build a unified audio tagging and speech recognition model Whisper-AT by freezing the backbone of Whisper, and training a lightweight audio tagging model on top of it. With <1% extra computational cost, Whisper-AT can recognize audio events, in addition to spoken text, in a single forward pass.

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Registry

Crossref · 10.21437/interspeech.2023-2193

Cites

27 of 27 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • Adopting Whisper and TLTR as the audio encoder instead of the AST audio encoder in LTU enables LTU-AS to recognize both speech and audio events.

    “This change enables LTU-AS to recognize both speech and audio events.”

    From Joint Audio and Speech Understanding (2023) · cites this paper as [3]

    Section 4, “Unifying ASR and Audio Tagging Model,” says that adding audio-tagging layers to Whisper enables Whisper-AT to produce spoken text and sound labels in one forward pass. The paper also evaluates a TL-Tr tagging model, but it does not study LTU-AS or show that replacing LTU’s AST encoder enables that specific model to recognize both. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The Whisper encoder encodes rich audio events and speech paralinguistic information, but it encodes information in the representations of different layers.

    “although the Whisper encoder encodes rich audio events and speech paralinguistic information [3,15,16], it encodes information in the representations of different layers.”

    From Joint Audio and Speech Understanding (2023) · cites this paper as [3]

    Section 3 reports that Whisper’s intermediate representations encode non-speech background sounds, and the Figure 3 caption says different sound classes are best represented at different layers. The cited paper does not establish the attributed claim about speech paralinguistic information. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The Whisper encoder features not only encode linguistic information, but also encode rich general background sound information and paralinguistic and other information such as emotion and language development.

    “it was found that the Whisper encoder features not only encode linguistic information, but also encode rich general background sound information [3] and paralinguistic and other information (e.g., emotion [15] and language development [16]).”

    From Joint Audio and Speech Understanding (2023) · cites this paper as [3]

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. H. Dinkel, Y. Wang, Z. Yan, J. Zhang, and Y. Wang, "Unikw- at: Unified keyword spotting and audio tagging," arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.11377, 2022. · arXiv
  2. P.-Y. Huang, H. Xu, J. B. Li, A. Baevski, M. Auli, W. Galuba, F. Metze, and C. Feichtenhofer, "Masked autoencoders that lis- ten," in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022.

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Authors
Gong, Y., Khurana, S., Karlinsky, L., & Glass, J.
Affiliations
  • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (US)
  • IBM (United States) (US)
Venue
INTERSPEECH 2023
Publisher
ISCA
Published
2023-08-20
Pages
2798-2802
ISSN
2308-457X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385807453
Cited by
65
References
26
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 30 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 2
FWCI
11.52
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Interspeech (USB) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Music and Audio Processing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
Keywords
Whisper, speech recognition, noise robustness, noise invariance, sound representation, background sound, transfer learning

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