{"paper":{"title":"Benchmarking Training Paradigms, Dataset Composition, and Model Scaling for Child ASR in ESPnet","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Abeer Alwan, Anyu Ying, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, Hugo Van hamme, Hye-Jin Shim, Mohan Shi, Natarajan Balaji Shankar, Pu Wang, Shinji Watanabe, Siddhant Arora","submitted_at":"2025-08-22T17:59:35Z","abstract_excerpt":"Despite advancements in ASR, child speech recognition remains challenging due to acoustic variability and limited annotated data. While fine-tuning adult ASR models on child speech is common, comparisons with flat-start training remain underexplored. We compare flat-start training across multiple datasets, SSL representations (WavLM, XEUS), and decoder architectures. Our results show that SSL representations are biased toward adult speech, with flat-start training on child speech mitigating these biases. We also analyze model scaling, finding consistent improvements up to 1B parameters, beyond"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.16576","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/2508.16576/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"}