DeCRED: Decoder-Centric Regularization for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech
  Recognition
Authors: name: Alexander Polok; name: Santosh Kesiraju; name: Karel Beneš; name: Bolaji Yusuf; name: Lukáš Burget; name: Jan Černocký
Published: 2025-08-12 13:44:50

Abstract: This paper presents a simple yet effective regularization for the internal
language model induced by the decoder in encoder-decoder ASR models, thereby
improving robustness and generalization in both in- and out-of-domain settings.
The proposed method, Decoder-Centric Regularization in Encoder-Decoder
(DeCRED), adds auxiliary classifiers to the decoder, enabling next token
prediction via intermediate logits. Empirically, DeCRED reduces the mean
internal LM BPE perplexity by 36.6% relative to 11 test sets. Furthermore, this
translates into actual WER improvements over the baseline in 5 of 7 in-domain
and 3 of 4 out-of-domain test sets, reducing macro WER from 6.4% to 6.3% and
18.2% to 16.2%, respectively. On TEDLIUM3, DeCRED achieves 7.0% WER, surpassing
the baseline and encoder-centric InterCTC regularization by 0.6% and 0.5%,
respectively. Finally, we compare DeCRED with OWSM v3.1 and Whisper-medium,
showing competitive WERs despite training on much less data with fewer
parameters.