# Incorporating VAD into ASR System by Multi-task Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [State-of-the-art Speech Recognition With Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01769/) (2017)
- [pyannote.audio: neural building blocks for speaker diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01255/) (2019)
- [Exploring Architectures, Data and Units For Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition with RNN-Transducer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00841/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention Aligner: A Latency-Control End-to-End Model for ASR Using Self-Attention Network and Chunk-Hopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06450/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Domain-Adversarial Voice Activity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10655/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Transferable Adversarial Attacks against ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09220/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When we use End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) system for real-world applications, a voice activity detection (VAD) system is usually needed to improve the performance and to reduce the computational cost by discarding non-speech parts in the audio. Usually ASR and VAD systems are trained and utilized independently to each other. In this paper, we present a novel multi-task learning (MTL) framework that incorporates VAD into the ASR system. The proposed system learns ASR and VAD jointly in the training stage. With the assistance of VAD, the ASR performance improves as its connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss function can leverage the VAD alignment information. In the inference stage, the proposed system removes non-speech parts at low computational cost and recognizes speech parts with high robustness. Experimental results on segmented speech data show that by utilizing VAD information, the proposed method outperforms the baseline ASR system on both English and Chinese datasets. On unsegmented speech data, we find that the system outperforms the ASR systems that build an extra GMM-based or DNN-based voice activity detector.