# The ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge: Towards Inclusive ASR Benchmarking for All Language Varieties

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07139 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07139/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11596/) (2023)
- [SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06849/) (2022)
- [OWSM v3.1: Better and Faster Open Whisper-Style Speech Models based on E-Branchformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16658/) (2024)
- [ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10615/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00837/) (2024)
- [GLOBE: A High-quality English Corpus with Global Accents for Zero-shot Speaker Adaptive Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14875/) (2024)
- [ML-SUPERB 2.0: Benchmarking Multilingual Speech Models Across Modeling Constraints, Languages, and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08641/) (2024)
- [SwissDial: Parallel Multidialectal Corpus of Spoken Swiss German](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11401/) (2021)
- [SUPERB @ SLT 2022: Challenge on Generalization and Efficiency of Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08634/) (2022)
- [Towards measuring fairness in speech recognition: Fair-Speech dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12734/) (2024)
- [Casablanca: Data and Models for Multidialectal Arabic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04527/) (2024)
- [AV-SUPERB: A Multi-Task Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Visual Representation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10787/) (2023)
- [OWLS: Scaling Laws for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10373/) (2025)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02419/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Multimodal In-context Learning for ASR of Low-resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05707/) (2026)
- [How I Built ASR for Endangered Languages with a Spoken Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04832/) (2025)
- [Towards Fair ASR For Second Language Speakers Using Fairness Prompted Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18374/) (2025)
- [GigaAM Multilingual: Foundation Model for Underrepresented Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10371/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent improvements in multilingual ASR have not been equally distributed across languages and language varieties. To advance state-of-the-art (SOTA) ASR models, we present the Interspeech 2025 ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge. We construct a new test suite that consists of data from 200+ languages, accents, and dialects to evaluate SOTA multilingual speech models. The challenge also introduces an online evaluation server based on DynaBench, allowing for flexibility in model design and architecture for participants. The challenge received 5 submissions from 3 teams, all of which outperformed our baselines. The best-performing submission achieved an absolute improvement in LID accuracy of 23% and a reduction in CER of 18% when compared to the best baseline on a general multilingual test set. On accented and dialectal data, the best submission obtained 30.2% lower CER and 15.7% higher LID accuracy, showing the importance of community challenges in making speech technologies more inclusive.