arXiv · 2610.17019
Understanding Personalization Gains in Whisper
Abstract
Whisper-style ASR models provide strong zero-shot transcription, but their residual errors are not evenly distributed across datasets, recording conditions, and metadata-based groups. We study when lightweight low-rank adaptation (LoRA) improves Whisper and whether observed gains require group-specific adapters. Across Common Voice, LibriSpeech, and VoxPopuli, we compare zero-shot Whisper, pooled LoRA, and group-specific LoRA under matched within-group splits. We find that adaptation is not uniformly beneficial: gains are concentrated in difficult Common Voice groups, are consistent on VoxPopuli, and largely disappear on low-error LibriSpeech. Crucially, pooled LoRA often matches, and sometimes clearly outperforms, group-specific LoRA. Gains over zero-shot should therefore be tested against matched pooled adaptation before being interpreted as evidence of personalization.
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Sergei Katkov, Antonio Liotta. 2026-10-12. Understanding Personalization Gains in Whisper. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-37867-5_1
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