WAVe: Word-Aligned Verification of Synthetic Speech for ASR

Solving the Synthetic Audio Quality Bottleneck

Training robust ASR systems requires massive amounts of high-quality audio data. Synthetic audio generation offers a promising solution, but introduces a critical challenge: how do you automatically identify when synthesized audio is good enough to train on?

Why WAVe?

The Problem: Not all synthetic audio is created equal. Poor-quality synthetic samples can degrade ASR model performance, yet manually filtering thousands of hours of audio is impractical. Traditional approaches rely on ASR metrics (WER/CER) or simple heuristics, which often fail to capture subtle quality issues.

Our Solution: WAVe introduces a novel multimodal embedding model that learns to measure speech-transcript alignment quality at the word level. By learning what "good alignment" looks like from real data, WAVe effectively identifies synthetic samples that deviate from natural speech patterns.

The Results:

• 34% reduction in training steps while maintaining or improving ASR performance
• Up to 50% improvement in cross-domain generalization (e.g., MLS benchmark: 13.54% → 6.89% WER)
• 30% less synthetic data needed compared to previous filtering methods, with superior results
• Effective detection of localized synthesis errors that sentence-level methods miss

Key Innovation: Word-Level Alignment

Unlike conventional sentence-level filtering, WAVe operates at finer granularity through attention-based word-level alignment. This enables detection of:

• Unnatural prosody or timing
• Mispronunciations or incorrect audio synthesis
• Text-audio mismatches
• Poor audio quality that would hurt ASR training

The result? Cleaner synthetic training data → Better downstream ASR models → Faster training.

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🔗 Trained Models

All trained models are available on Hugging Face: yuriyvnv

Including:

• WAVe multimodal embedding models (Dutch & Portuguese)
• Fine-tuned Whisper models (Tiny, Small, Large-v3) across multiple configurations
• Models trained on filtered synthetic data, unfiltered data, and CommonVoice-only baselines

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Supplementary Materials

The following pdf files help guide the user how the models were trained to replicate our results. A static seed of 42 was used across all runs.

• Corruption_Strategies.pdf: Details the corruption strategies used for training WAVe model
• synthetic_data_generation_prompts.pdf: Describes the prompts and methodology for generating synthetic training data
• WAVe_Configurations_training.pdf: Configuration details for WAVe model training
• Whisper_Finetuning_config.pdf: Configuration specifications for Whisper model fine-tuning

Repository Structure

This repository is organized into several main directories, each containing specific components of our research:

📁 training_multimodal/

Contains the core multimodal embedding training implementation with word-level alignment:

• Core model architecture with word alignment module
• Training scripts for the alignment-based embedding model
• Inference and evaluation scripts for synthetic data
• Dataset creation and processing utilities
• Trained model results for Dutch and Portuguese languages

📁 training_ASR/

Contains Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) training and evaluation:

• Whisper fine-tuning scripts for multiple languages
• Evaluation frameworks for ASR models on various datasets
• Baseline ASR experiments supporting the main multimodal work

📁 synthetic_audio/

Contains synthetic audio generation and verification:

• Transcript and Text-to-Speech (TTS) generation for creating synthetic training data
• Dataset verification and quality control scripts
• Audio processing utilities for synthetic data creation

📁 multimodal_training_logs/

Contains training logs and visualization scripts:

• Training progress logs for all multimodal experiments
• Plotting and visualization scripts for training metrics
• Performance analysis tools

Key Features

• Word-Level Alignment: Core mechanism for aligning speech and text representations at the word level
• Multilingual Support: Experiments on Dutch and Portuguese languages
• Synthetic Data Integration: Leveraging synthetic audio for improved training
• Comprehensive Evaluation: Both intrinsic alignment metrics and downstream ASR performance

Quick Start

1. For multimodal embedding training: See training_multimodal/README.md
2. For ASR training and evaluation: See training_ASR/README.md
3. For synthetic audio generation: See synthetic_audio/README.md

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• PyTorch 2.0+
• Transformers 4.30+
• CUDA-compatible GPU (recommended)

Detailed requirements are provided in each subfolder's README.

Citation

@article{perezhohin2026wave, title={WAVe: Word-aligned verification of synthetic speech for ASR}, author={Perezhohin, Yuriy and Castelli, Mauro}, journal={Information Sciences}, pages={123591}, year={2026}, publisher={Elsevier} } & @article{perezhohin2024enhancing, title={Enhancing automatic speech recognition: effects of semantic audio filtering on models performance}, author={Perezhohin, Yuriy and Santos, Tiago and Costa, Victor and Peres, Fernando and Castelli, Mauro}, journal={IEEE Access}, volume={12}, pages={155136--155150}, year={2024}, publisher={IEEE} }