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Main Authors: Duret, Jarod, Mdhaffar, Salima, Laperrière, Gaëlle, Whetten, Ryan, Galametz, Audrey, Kobus, Catherine, Martin, Marion-Cécile, Oleiwan, Jo, Estève, Yannick
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12101
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author Duret, Jarod
Mdhaffar, Salima
Laperrière, Gaëlle
Whetten, Ryan
Galametz, Audrey
Kobus, Catherine
Martin, Marion-Cécile
Oleiwan, Jo
Estève, Yannick
author_facet Duret, Jarod
Mdhaffar, Salima
Laperrière, Gaëlle
Whetten, Ryan
Galametz, Audrey
Kobus, Catherine
Martin, Marion-Cécile
Oleiwan, Jo
Estève, Yannick
contents In this study, we investigate the benefits of domain-specific self-supervised pre-training for both offline and streaming ASR in Air Traffic Control (ATC) environments. We train BEST-RQ models on 4.5k hours of unlabeled ATC data, then fine-tune on a smaller supervised ATC set. To enable real-time processing, we propose using chunked attention and dynamic convolutions, ensuring low-latency inference. We compare these in-domain SSL models against state-of-the-art, general-purpose speech encoders such as w2v-BERT 2.0 and HuBERT. Results show that domain-adapted pre-training substantially improves performance on standard ATC benchmarks, significantly reducing word error rates when compared to models trained on broad speech corpora. Furthermore, the proposed streaming approach further improves word error rate under tighter latency constraints, making it particularly suitable for safety-critical aviation applications. These findings highlight that specializing SSL representations for ATC data is a practical path toward more accurate and efficient ASR systems in real-world operational settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12101
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In-domain SSL pre-training and streaming ASR
Duret, Jarod
Mdhaffar, Salima
Laperrière, Gaëlle
Whetten, Ryan
Galametz, Audrey
Kobus, Catherine
Martin, Marion-Cécile
Oleiwan, Jo
Estève, Yannick
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In this study, we investigate the benefits of domain-specific self-supervised pre-training for both offline and streaming ASR in Air Traffic Control (ATC) environments. We train BEST-RQ models on 4.5k hours of unlabeled ATC data, then fine-tune on a smaller supervised ATC set. To enable real-time processing, we propose using chunked attention and dynamic convolutions, ensuring low-latency inference. We compare these in-domain SSL models against state-of-the-art, general-purpose speech encoders such as w2v-BERT 2.0 and HuBERT. Results show that domain-adapted pre-training substantially improves performance on standard ATC benchmarks, significantly reducing word error rates when compared to models trained on broad speech corpora. Furthermore, the proposed streaming approach further improves word error rate under tighter latency constraints, making it particularly suitable for safety-critical aviation applications. These findings highlight that specializing SSL representations for ATC data is a practical path toward more accurate and efficient ASR systems in real-world operational settings.
title In-domain SSL pre-training and streaming ASR
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12101