Exploration of Adapter for Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

Adapting a robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to tackle unseen noise scenarios is crucial. Integrating adapters into neural networks has emerged as a potent technique for transfer learning. This paper thoroughly investigates adapter-based noise-robust ASR adaptation. We conducted the experiments using the CHiME--4 dataset. The results show that inserting the adapter in the shallow layer yields superior effectiveness, and there is no significant difference between adapting solely within the shallow layer and adapting across all layers. Besides, the simulated data helps the system to improve its performance under real noise conditions. Nonetheless, when the amount of data is the same, the real data is more effective than the simulated data. Multi-condition training remains valid for adapter training. Furthermore, integrating adapters into speech enhancement-based ASR systems yields substantial improvements.