Exploring Subgroup Performance in End-to-End Speech Models

Alkis Koudounas, Eliana Pastor, Giuseppe Attanasio, Vittorio Mazzia, Manuel Giollo, Thomas Gueudré, Luca Cagliero, Luca de Alfaro, Elena Baralis, Daniele Amberti

Abstract: End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding models are generally evaluated according to their overall accuracy, or separately on (a priori defined) data subgroups of interest. We propose a technique for analyzing model performance at the subgroup level, which considers all subgroups that can be defined via a given set of metadata and are above a specified minimum size. The metadata can represent user characteristics, recording conditions, and speech targets. Our technique is based on advances in model bias analysis, enabling efficient exploration of resulting subgroups. A fine-grained analysis reveals how model performance varies across sub-groups, identifying modeling issues or bias towards specific subgroups.We compare the subgroup-level performance of models based on wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT on the Fluent Speech Commands dataset. The experimental results illustrate how subgroup-level analysis reveals a finer and more complete picture of performance changes when models are replaced, automatically identifying the subgroups that most benefit or fail to benefit from the change.