Unveiling the Potential of LLM-Based ASR on Chinese Open-Source Datasets

Xuelong Geng, Tianyi Xu, Kun Wei, Bingshen Mu, Hongfei Xue, He Wang, Yangze Li, Pengcheng Guo, Yuhang Dai, Longhao Li, Mingchen Shao, Lei Xie

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated un-paralleled effectiveness in various NLP tasks, and integrating LLMs with automatic speech recognition (ASR) is becoming a mainstream paradigm. Building upon this momentum, our research delves into an in-depth examination of this paradigm on a large open-source Chinese dataset. Specifically, our research aims to evaluate the impact of various configurations of speech encoders, LLMs, and projector modules in the context of the speech foundation encoder-LLM ASR paradigm. Furthermore, we introduce a three-stage training approach, expressly developed to enhance the model's ability to align auditory and textual information. The implementation of this approach, along-side the strategic integration of ASR components, enabled us to achieve the SOTA performance on the AISHELL-1, Test_Net, and Test_Meeting test sets. Our analysis presents an empirical foundation for future research in LLM-based ASR systems and offers insights into optimizing performance using Chinese datasets. We will publicly release all scripts used for data preparation, training, inference, and scoring, as well as pre-trained models and training logs to promote reproducible research.