WhisTLE: Deeply Supervised, Text-Only Domain Adaptation for Pretrained
  Speech Recognition Transformers
Authors: name: Akshat Pandey; name: Karun Kumar; name: Raphael Tang
Published: 2025-09-12 17:59:09

Abstract: Pretrained automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper perform
well but still need domain adaptation to handle unseen vocabulary and parlance.
In many real-world settings, collecting speech data is impractical,
necessitating text-only adaptation. We propose WhisTLE, a deeply supervised,
text-only adaptation method for pretrained encoder-decoder ASR models. WhisTLE
trains a variational autoencoder (VAE) to model encoder outputs from text and
fine-tunes the decoder using the learned text-to-latent encoder, optionally
combined with text-to-speech (TTS) adaptation. At inference, the original
encoder is restored, incurring no extra runtime cost. Across four out-of-domain
datasets and four ASR models, WhisTLE with TTS reduces word error rate (WER) by
12.3% relative to TTS-only adaptation and outperforms all non-WhisTLE baselines
in 27 of 32 scenarios.