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arXiv · 2501.11378

Investigation of Whisper ASR Hallucinations Induced by Non-Speech Audio

Mateusz Barański·Jan Jasiński·Julitta Bartolewska·Stanisław Kacprzak·Marcin Witkowski·Konrad Kowalczyk
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Abstract

Hallucinations of deep neural models are amongst key challenges in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we investigate hallucinations of the Whisper ASR model induced by non-speech audio segments present during inference. By inducting hallucinations with various types of sounds, we show that there exists a set of hallucinations that appear frequently. We then study hallucinations caused by the augmentation of speech with such sounds. Finally, we describe the creation of a bag of hallucinations (BoH) that allows to remove the effect of hallucinations through the post-processing of text transcriptions. The results of our experiments show that such post-processing is capable of reducing word error rate (WER) and acts as a good safeguard against problematic hallucinations.

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Mateusz Barański, Jan Jasiński, Julitta Bartolewska, Stanisław Kacprzak, Marcin Witkowski, Konrad Kowalczyk. 2025-01-20. Investigation of Whisper ASR Hallucinations Induced by Non-Speech Audio. https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp49660.2025.10890105

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