Speech LLMs are Contextual Reasoning Transcribers

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Deng, Keqi, Fan, Ruchao, Ren, Bo, Wang, Yiming, Li, Jinyu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866910093456441344
author Deng, Keqi
Fan, Ruchao
Ren, Bo
Wang, Yiming
Li, Jinyu
author_facet Deng, Keqi
Fan, Ruchao
Ren, Bo
Wang, Yiming
Li, Jinyu
contents Despite extensions to speech inputs, effectively leveraging the rich knowledge and contextual understanding of large language models (LLMs) in automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains non-trivial, as the task primarily involves direct speech-to-text mapping. To address this, this paper proposes chain-of-thought ASR (CoT-ASR), which constructs a reasoning chain that enables LLMs to first analyze the input speech and generate contextual analysis, thereby fully exploiting their generative capabilities. With this contextual reasoning, CoT-ASR then performs more informed speech recognition and completes both reasoning and transcription in a single pass. Moreover, CoT-ASR naturally supports user-guided transcription: while designed to self-generate reasoning, it can also seamlessly incorporate user-provided context to guide transcription, further extending ASR functionality. To reduce the modality gap, this paper introduces a CTC-guided Modality Adapter, which uses CTC non-blank token probabilities to weight LLM embeddings, efficiently aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's textual latent space. Experiments show that, compared to standard LLM-based ASR, CoT-ASR achieves a relative reduction of 8.7% in word error rate (WER) and 16.9% in entity error rate (EER).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00610
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speech LLMs are Contextual Reasoning Transcribers
Deng, Keqi
Fan, Ruchao
Ren, Bo
Wang, Yiming
Li, Jinyu
Computation and Language
Despite extensions to speech inputs, effectively leveraging the rich knowledge and contextual understanding of large language models (LLMs) in automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains non-trivial, as the task primarily involves direct speech-to-text mapping. To address this, this paper proposes chain-of-thought ASR (CoT-ASR), which constructs a reasoning chain that enables LLMs to first analyze the input speech and generate contextual analysis, thereby fully exploiting their generative capabilities. With this contextual reasoning, CoT-ASR then performs more informed speech recognition and completes both reasoning and transcription in a single pass. Moreover, CoT-ASR naturally supports user-guided transcription: while designed to self-generate reasoning, it can also seamlessly incorporate user-provided context to guide transcription, further extending ASR functionality. To reduce the modality gap, this paper introduces a CTC-guided Modality Adapter, which uses CTC non-blank token probabilities to weight LLM embeddings, efficiently aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's textual latent space. Experiments show that, compared to standard LLM-based ASR, CoT-ASR achieves a relative reduction of 8.7% in word error rate (WER) and 16.9% in entity error rate (EER).
title Speech LLMs are Contextual Reasoning Transcribers
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00610