LLMs and Speech: Integration vs. Combination

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Schmitt, Robin, Zeyer, Albert, Zeineldeen, Mohammad, Schlüter, Ralf, Ney, Hermann
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Schmitt, Robin
Zeyer, Albert
Zeineldeen, Mohammad
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
author_facet Schmitt, Robin
Zeyer, Albert
Zeineldeen, Mohammad
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
contents In this work, we study how to best utilize pre-trained LLMs for automatic speech recognition. Specifically, we compare the tight integration of an acoustic model (AM) with the LLM ("speech LLM") to the traditional way of combining AM and LLM via shallow fusion. For tight integration, we provide ablations on the effect of different label units, fine-tuning strategies, LLM sizes and pre-training data, attention interfaces, encoder downsampling, text prompts, and length normalization. Additionally, we investigate joint recognition with a CTC model to mitigate hallucinations of speech LLMs and present effective optimizations for this joint recognition. For shallow fusion, we investigate the effect of fine-tuning the LLM on the transcriptions using different label units, and we compare rescoring AM hypotheses to single-pass recognition with label-wise or delayed fusion of AM and LLM scores. We train on Librispeech and Loquacious and evaluate our models on the HuggingFace ASR leaderboard.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15045
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMs and Speech: Integration vs. Combination
Schmitt, Robin
Zeyer, Albert
Zeineldeen, Mohammad
Schlüter, Ralf
Ney, Hermann
Audio and Speech Processing
In this work, we study how to best utilize pre-trained LLMs for automatic speech recognition. Specifically, we compare the tight integration of an acoustic model (AM) with the LLM ("speech LLM") to the traditional way of combining AM and LLM via shallow fusion. For tight integration, we provide ablations on the effect of different label units, fine-tuning strategies, LLM sizes and pre-training data, attention interfaces, encoder downsampling, text prompts, and length normalization. Additionally, we investigate joint recognition with a CTC model to mitigate hallucinations of speech LLMs and present effective optimizations for this joint recognition. For shallow fusion, we investigate the effect of fine-tuning the LLM on the transcriptions using different label units, and we compare rescoring AM hypotheses to single-pass recognition with label-wise or delayed fusion of AM and LLM scores. We train on Librispeech and Loquacious and evaluate our models on the HuggingFace ASR leaderboard.
title LLMs and Speech: Integration vs. Combination
topic Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15045