To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation
This work addresses the problem of efficient and inclusive ASR for diverse Arabic dialects, which is incremental as it applies distillation to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of robust Arabic Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) by distilling knowledge from large teacher models into smaller, more efficient student models, achieving a 45.0% WER that surpasses larger state-of-the-art models and improving performance on under-represented dialects.
Arabic is known to present unique challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). On one hand, its rich linguistic diversity and wide range of dialects complicate the development of robust, inclusive models. On the other, current multilingual ASR models are compute-intensive and lack proper comprehensive evaluations. In light of these challenges, we distill knowledge from large teacher models into smaller student variants that are more efficient. We also introduce a novel human-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. We further evaluate both our models and existing SoTA multilingual models on both standard available benchmarks and our new dialectal data. Our best-distilled model's overall performance ($45.0$\% WER) surpasses that of a SoTA model twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2, WER=$47.0$\%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=$55.1$\%), and its average performance on our new dialectal data ($56.9$\% WER) outperforms all other models. To gain more insight into the poor performance of these models on dialectal data, we conduct an error analysis and report the main types of errors the different models tend to make. The GitHub repository for the project is available at \url{https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar}.