To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Waheed, Abdul, Kadaoui, Karima, Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Waheed, Abdul
Kadaoui, Karima
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
author_facet Waheed, Abdul
Kadaoui, Karima
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
contents Arabic is known to present unique challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). On one hand, its rich linguistic diversity and wide range of dialects complicate the development of robust, inclusive models. On the other, current multilingual ASR models are compute-intensive and lack proper comprehensive evaluations. In light of these challenges, we distill knowledge from large teacher models into smaller student variants that are more efficient. We also introduce a novel human-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. We further evaluate both our models and existing SoTA multilingual models on both standard available benchmarks and our new dialectal data. Our best-distilled model's overall performance ($45.0$\% WER) surpasses that of a SoTA model twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2, WER=$47.0$\%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=$55.1$\%), and its average performance on our new dialectal data ($56.9$\% WER) outperforms all other models. To gain more insight into the poor performance of these models on dialectal data, we conduct an error analysis and report the main types of errors the different models tend to make. The GitHub repository for the project is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_04512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation
Waheed, Abdul
Kadaoui, Karima
Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Arabic is known to present unique challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). On one hand, its rich linguistic diversity and wide range of dialects complicate the development of robust, inclusive models. On the other, current multilingual ASR models are compute-intensive and lack proper comprehensive evaluations. In light of these challenges, we distill knowledge from large teacher models into smaller student variants that are more efficient. We also introduce a novel human-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. We further evaluate both our models and existing SoTA multilingual models on both standard available benchmarks and our new dialectal data. Our best-distilled model's overall performance ($45.0$\% WER) surpasses that of a SoTA model twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2, WER=$47.0$\%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=$55.1$\%), and its average performance on our new dialectal data ($56.9$\% WER) outperforms all other models. To gain more insight into the poor performance of these models on dialectal data, we conduct an error analysis and report the main types of errors the different models tend to make. The GitHub repository for the project is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar}.
title To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04512