# Improving ASR Contextual Biasing with Guided Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [Listen, Attend and Spell](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01211/) (2015)
- [Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07503/) (2015)
- [Deep context: end-to-end contextual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02480/) (2018)
- [Contextualized Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition with Trie-Based Deep Biasing and Shallow Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02194/) (2021)
- [Contextual RNN-T For Open Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03411/) (2020)
- [CTC-Segmentation of Large Corpora for German End-to-end Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09127/) (2020)
- [Deep Shallow Fusion for RNN-T Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07754/) (2020)
- [Contextual Adapters for Personalized Speech Recognition in Neural Transducers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13660/) (2022)
- [Context-Aware Transformer Transducer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03250/) (2021)
- [Class LM and word mapping for contextual biasing in End-to-End ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05609/) (2020)
- [Contextualized End-to-End Speech Recognition with Contextual Phrase Prediction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12493/) (2023)
- [Fast Contextual Adaptation with Neural Associative Memory for On-Device Personalized Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02220/) (2021)
- [Robust Acoustic and Semantic Contextual Biasing in Neural Transducers for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05271/) (2023)
- [CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12839/) (2023)
- [Two Stage Contextual Word Filtering for Context bias in Unified Streaming and Non-streaming Transducer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06735/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Contextual Biasing for Transducer Based Streaming Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00804/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Contextual Adapters To Improve Custom Word Recognition In Low-resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00759/) (2023)
- [Multi-task RNN-T with Semantic Decoder for Streamable Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00558/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [CTC-Assisted LLM-Based Contextual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06437/) (2024)
- [Improving Neural Biasing for Contextual Speech Recognition by Early Context Injection and Text Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10303/) (2024)
- [Contextualized End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition with Intermediate Biasing Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16120/) (2024)
- [SLAM-LLM: A Modular, Open-Source Multimodal Large Language Model Framework and Best Practice for Speech, Language, Audio and Music Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09385/) (2026)
- [Zero-shot Context Biasing with Trie-based Decoding using Synthetic Multi-Pronunciation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17796/) (2025)
- [IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19157/) (2026)
- [An Effective Context-Balanced Adaptation Approach for Long-Tailed Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06468/) (2024)
- [PMF-CEC: Phoneme-augmented Multimodal Fusion for Context-aware ASR Error Correction with Error-specific Selective Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11064/) (2025)
- [Enhancing the Robustness of Contextual ASR to Varying Biasing Information Volumes Through Purified Semantic Correlation Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05908/) (2025)
- [Improving Synthetic Data Training for Contextual Biasing Models with a Keyword-Aware Cost Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09197/) (2025)
- [A Neural Model for Contextual Biasing Score Learning and Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23849/) (2025)
- [An Efficient Self-Learning Framework For Interactive Spoken Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10515/) (2024)
- [PARCO: Phoneme-Augmented Robust Contextual ASR via Contrastive Entity Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04357/) (2025)
- [Peeking Into The Future For Contextual Biasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17657/) (2025)
- [CALM: Joint Contextual Acoustic-Linguistic Modeling for Personalization of Multi-Speaker ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22792/) (2026)
- [From Oracle to Noisy Context: Mitigating Contextual Exposure Bias in Speech-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24034/) (2026)
- [In-Context Adaptation of Encoder-Decoder Models in Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33865/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a Guided Attention (GA) auxiliary training loss, which improves the effectiveness and robustness of automatic speech recognition (ASR) contextual biasing without introducing additional parameters. A common challenge in previous literature is that the word error rate (WER) reduction brought by contextual biasing diminishes as the number of bias phrases increases. To address this challenge, we employ a GA loss as an additional training objective besides the Transducer loss. The proposed GA loss aims to teach the cross attention how to align bias phrases with text tokens or audio frames. Compared to studies with similar motivations, the proposed loss operates directly on the cross attention weights and is easier to implement. Through extensive experiments based on Conformer Transducer with Contextual Adapter, we demonstrate that the proposed method not only leads to a lower WER but also retains its effectiveness as the number of bias phrases increases. Specifically, the GA loss decreases the WER of rare vocabularies by up to 19.2% on LibriSpeech compared to the contextual biasing baseline, and up to 49.3% compared to a vanilla Transducer.