Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.26937

A Temporal-Envelope Frontend with Learnable Per-Channel Energy Normalization for Whisper-Based Children's ASR

Edem Ahadzi·Ruchi Pandey·Tomi H. Kinnunen
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Temporal envelopes carry cues critical to speech intelligibility, yet ASR frontends based on log-mel spectrograms do not explicitly model continuous sub-band envelope structure. This limitation is particularly acute for children's speech, where high acoustic variability demands robust feature representations. We propose a modular time-domain frontend that decomposes speech into sub-band envelopes using mel-spaced windowed-sinc filters and the Hilbert transform, with learnable per-channel energy normalization (PCEN) jointly optimized with the Whisper model. On the MyST children's speech corpus, systematic ablations identify full-band windowed-sinc filters, Hilbert envelopes, a 25 Hz smoothing cutoff, and learnable PCEN as the best configuration. Under the same Whisper-small fine-tuning setup, the frontend reduces WER from 13.16% to 11.08%, a 15.8% relative reduction over the log-mel baseline, and outperforms the evaluated Kid-Whisper checkpoint on the same cleaned test split. These results show that temporal-envelope representations and learnable frontend normalization are effective complements to backend adaptation for children's ASR.

Explore related subjects

eess.AS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Edem Ahadzi, Ruchi Pandey, Tomi H. Kinnunen. 2026-09-22. A Temporal-Envelope Frontend with Learnable Per-Channel Energy Normalization for Whisper-Based Children's ASR. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26937

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Joint Residual Reweighting for Classifier Free Guidance in Flow-Matching Zero-Shot TTS

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is widely used in flow-matching-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), where generation is conditioned on text content and a speech prompt. Standard CFG uses a single guidance weight for their joint conditional effect, while branch-selective guidance emphasizes text or speaker conditioning and can introduce a trade-off between text accuracy and speaker similarity. In this paper, we revisit CFG under independently masked conditions and decompose the guidance field into text, speaker, and joint residuals. We show that condition-specific branch differences couple the joint residual with the corresponding text or speaker residual under a shared weight. Trajectory analysis further shows that the joint residual varies over flow time and contains information that cannot be represented by reweighting the text and speaker residuals alone. Based on these observations, we propose joint residual reweighting, which assigns independent weights to the three residuals. Experiments on F5-TTS, CosyVoice2, and GLM-TTS across three evaluation sets show overall improvements in speaker similarity and text accuracy over the default CFG settings without retraining.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

A Parameter-Free Few-Shot Evaluation for Elephant Vocalisation Classification

We present a parameter-free episodic evaluation of nearest-centroid classification of elephant vocalisations on fixed pretrained embeddings, for the Elephant Voices (EV) and Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) datasets. We ask not which embedding yields the best classifier trained on all labelled data, but how the simplest classifier performs as the number of exemplars per class varies. There are no learnable parameters, because each class is modelled as the mean of its support embeddings and each query is assigned to the nearest centroid under squared Euclidean distance. Evaluation covers the fixed Perch (ver. 1), Perch (ver. 2) and HuBERT (base, layer 2) embeddings, alongside mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features, $N$-way $k$-shot, under the same stratified $K$-fold cross-validation protocol as the trained classifiers. None of these embedding models was trained to distinguish elephant call types. On the smaller EV dataset the centroid classifier is markedly data-efficient. Using Perch (ver. 1) or Perch (ver. 2) embeddings it overtakes in mean average precision (mAP) the fully-trained logistic regression (LR) baseline from one or two exemplars and the recurrent baseline from two. Over the reduced set of call types on which the strongly-supervised end-to-end baseline was trained, the centroid classifier using Perch (ver. 2) embeddings overtakes that baseline in mAP as well, from two exemplars. On the larger LDC dataset the recurrent baselines retain their advantage for all considered values of $k$. Only LR is overtaken, and only in mAP. Nearest-centroid classification is therefore preferable precisely when exemplars are few and the fixed embedding already separates the call types.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Source-Adaptive Data Curation for Bilingual NVV-Aware ASR

Nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs), such as laughter, sighs, breaths, and coughs, convey affective and interactional information that conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often discard. We present a bilingual Mandarin-English system for Track 1 of the NVVSpeech Challenge at ISCSLP 2026, which requires joint transcription of lexical content and 16 NVV categories at their transcript-relative positions. Our NVV-Aware Whisper adapts Whisper-medium through checkpoint-compatible vocabulary remapping, enabling lexical tokens and inline NVV tags to be decoded within a unified autoregressive sequence without expanding the vocabulary. To provide reliable and diverse supervision, we further introduce a source-adaptive data curation strategy that refines public NVV corpora through acoustic augmentation and multimodal LLM filtering, while mining spontaneous NVVs from in-the-wild media through automated preprocessing and annotation. Under the official bilingual evaluation protocol, the proposed system improves final score from 33.32 to 53.61, with ablations confirming the complementary benefits of the proposed data-curation components.

eess.AS↗