# Re-evaluating Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 102 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (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)
- [MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08484/) (2015)
- [Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition using Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06773/) (2016)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05171/) (2020)
- [Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10283/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Speech Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03329/) (2023)
- [Truncation Sampling as Language Model Desmoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15191/) (2022)
- [High Quality Rather than High Model Probability: Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Neural Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09388/) (2021)
- [Distil-Whisper: Robust Knowledge Distillation via Large-Scale Pseudo Labelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00430/) (2023)
- [Recognizing long-form speech using streaming end-to-end models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11455/) (2019)
- [Generative Speech Recognition Error Correction with Large Language Models and Task-Activating Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15649/) (2023)
- [What Doubling Tricks Can and Can't Do for Multi-Armed Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06971/) (2018)
- [Sampling-Based Approximations to Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04718/) (2021)
- [A spelling correction model for end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07178/) (2019)
- [JSUT corpus: free large-scale Japanese speech corpus for end-to-end speech synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00354/) (2017)
- [Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09860/) (2023)
- [Deliberation Model Based Two-Pass End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07962/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Zero-Shot Context-Aware ASR for Diverse Arabic Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18774/) (2025)
- [MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17255/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work has shown that sample-based Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding outperforms beam search in text-to-text generation tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning. On the other hand, beam search is the current practice for speech-to-text tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Speech Translation (ST). Given that MBR decoding is effective in text-to-text generation tasks, it is reasonable to expect it to also be effective for speech-to-text tasks. In this paper, we evaluate MBR decoding for ASR and ST tasks on English and Japanese using Whisper and its derivative models. We observe that the accuracy of MBR decoding outperforms that of beam search in most of the experimental settings we have evaluated. The results show that MBR decoding is a promising method for offline ASR and ST tasks that require high accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/mbr-for-asr