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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12969 |
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| _version_ | 1866912382051155968 |
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| author | Wang, Yingzhi Alhmoud, Anas Alsahly, Saad Alqurishi, Muhammad Ravanelli, Mirco |
| author_facet | Wang, Yingzhi Alhmoud, Anas Alsahly, Saad Alqurishi, Muhammad Ravanelli, Mirco |
| contents | OpenAI's Whisper has achieved significant success in Automatic Speech Recognition. However, it has consistently been found to exhibit hallucination issues, particularly in non-speech segments, which limits its broader application in complex industrial settings.
In this paper, we introduce a novel method to reduce Whisper's hallucination on non-speech segments without using any pre- or post-possessing techniques. Specifically, we benchmark the contribution of each self-attentional head in the Whisper-large-v3 decoder to the hallucination problem by performing a head-wise mask. Our findings reveal that only 3 of the 20 heads account for over 75% of the hallucinations on the UrbanSound dataset. We then fine-tune these three crazy heads using a collection of non-speech data. The results show that our best fine-tuned model, namely Calm-Whisper, achieves over 80% reduction in non-speech hallucination with only less than 0.1% WER degradation on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12969 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Calm-Whisper: Reduce Whisper Hallucination On Non-Speech By Calming Crazy Heads Down Wang, Yingzhi Alhmoud, Anas Alsahly, Saad Alqurishi, Muhammad Ravanelli, Mirco Computation and Language OpenAI's Whisper has achieved significant success in Automatic Speech Recognition. However, it has consistently been found to exhibit hallucination issues, particularly in non-speech segments, which limits its broader application in complex industrial settings. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to reduce Whisper's hallucination on non-speech segments without using any pre- or post-possessing techniques. Specifically, we benchmark the contribution of each self-attentional head in the Whisper-large-v3 decoder to the hallucination problem by performing a head-wise mask. Our findings reveal that only 3 of the 20 heads account for over 75% of the hallucinations on the UrbanSound dataset. We then fine-tune these three crazy heads using a collection of non-speech data. The results show that our best fine-tuned model, namely Calm-Whisper, achieves over 80% reduction in non-speech hallucination with only less than 0.1% WER degradation on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other. |
| title | Calm-Whisper: Reduce Whisper Hallucination On Non-Speech By Calming Crazy Heads Down |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12969 |