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arXiv · 2509.15095

Listening, Imagining & Refining: A Heuristic Optimized ASR Correction Framework with LLMs

Abstract

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems remain prone to errors that affect downstream applications. In this paper, we propose LIR-ASR, a heuristic optimized iterative correction framework using LLMs, inspired by human auditory perception. LIR-ASR applies a "Listening-Imagining-Refining" strategy, generating phonetic variants and refining them in context. A heuristic optimization with finite state machine (FSM) is introduced to prevent the correction process from being trapped in local optima and rule-based constraints help maintain semantic fidelity. Experiments on both English and Chinese ASR outputs show that LIR-ASR achieves average reductions in CER/WER of up to 1.5 percentage points compared to baselines, demonstrating substantial accuracy gains in transcription.

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Yutong Liu, Ziyue Zhang, Cheng Huang, Yongbin Yu, Xiangxiang Wang, Yuqing Cai, Nyima Tashi. 2025-09-20. Listening, Imagining & Refining: A Heuristic Optimized ASR Correction Framework with LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15095

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