SE-DiCoW: Self-Enrolled Diarization-Conditioned Whisper

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Polok, Alexander, Klement, Dominik, Cornell, Samuele, Wiesner, Matthew, Černocký, Jan, Khudanpur, Sanjeev, Burget, Lukáš
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917225008463872
author Polok, Alexander
Klement, Dominik
Cornell, Samuele
Wiesner, Matthew
Černocký, Jan
Khudanpur, Sanjeev
Burget, Lukáš
author_facet Polok, Alexander
Klement, Dominik
Cornell, Samuele
Wiesner, Matthew
Černocký, Jan
Khudanpur, Sanjeev
Burget, Lukáš
contents Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multi-speaker environments remains a major challenge. While some approaches achieve strong performance when fine-tuned on specific domains, few systems generalize well across out-of-domain datasets. Our prior work, Diarization-Conditioned Whisper (DiCoW), leverages speaker diarization outputs as conditioning information and, with minimal fine-tuning, demonstrated strong multilingual and multi-domain performance. In this paper, we address a key limitation of DiCoW: ambiguity in Silence-Target-Non-target-Overlap (STNO) masks, where two or more fully overlapping speakers may have nearly identical conditioning despite differing transcriptions. We introduce SE-DiCoW (Self-Enrolled Diarization-Conditioned Whisper), which uses diarization output to locate an enrollment segment anywhere in the conversation where the target speaker is most active. This enrollment segment is used as fixed conditioning via cross-attention at each encoder layer. We further refine DiCoW with improved data segmentation, model initialization, and augmentation. Together, these advances yield substantial gains: SE-DiCoW reduces macro-averaged tcpWER by 52.4% relative to the original DiCoW on the EMMA MT-ASR benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_19194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SE-DiCoW: Self-Enrolled Diarization-Conditioned Whisper
Polok, Alexander
Klement, Dominik
Cornell, Samuele
Wiesner, Matthew
Černocký, Jan
Khudanpur, Sanjeev
Burget, Lukáš
Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multi-speaker environments remains a major challenge. While some approaches achieve strong performance when fine-tuned on specific domains, few systems generalize well across out-of-domain datasets. Our prior work, Diarization-Conditioned Whisper (DiCoW), leverages speaker diarization outputs as conditioning information and, with minimal fine-tuning, demonstrated strong multilingual and multi-domain performance. In this paper, we address a key limitation of DiCoW: ambiguity in Silence-Target-Non-target-Overlap (STNO) masks, where two or more fully overlapping speakers may have nearly identical conditioning despite differing transcriptions. We introduce SE-DiCoW (Self-Enrolled Diarization-Conditioned Whisper), which uses diarization output to locate an enrollment segment anywhere in the conversation where the target speaker is most active. This enrollment segment is used as fixed conditioning via cross-attention at each encoder layer. We further refine DiCoW with improved data segmentation, model initialization, and augmentation. Together, these advances yield substantial gains: SE-DiCoW reduces macro-averaged tcpWER by 52.4% relative to the original DiCoW on the EMMA MT-ASR benchmark.
title SE-DiCoW: Self-Enrolled Diarization-Conditioned Whisper
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19194