{"paper":{"title":"Audio--Image Alignment as a Continued-Pretraining Stage Improves Low-Resource ASR","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"eess.AS","authors_text":"Nihar Desai, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Sujith Pulikodan","submitted_at":"2026-06-23T02:48:58Z","abstract_excerpt":"Thousands of languages are spoken worldwide, yet many remain under-resourced for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) due to the limited availability of high-quality transcribed speech data. Collecting accurate transcriptions is often costly and labor-intensive, particularly for low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate the use of aligned audio-image pairs to adapt pretrained audio encoders without requiring transcription data before supervised fine-tuning. Our proposed representation alignment stage is introduced between large-scale pretraining and supervised ASR fine-tuning. Specifi"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.24080","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.24080/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}