# Dialect Identification Using Resource-Efficient Fine-Tuning Approaches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02074/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (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)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [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)
- [8-bit Optimizers via Block-wise Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02861/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models with Just Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17333/) (2023)
- [LST: Ladder Side-Tuning for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06522/) (2022)
- [Self-attention Does Not Need O(n2) Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05682/) (2021)
- [Fine-tuning wav2vec2 for speaker recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15053/) (2021)
- [Efficient Adapter Transfer of Self-Supervised Speech Models for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03218/) (2022)
- [Towards Adaptive Prefix Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15212/) (2023)
- [UniPT: Universal Parallel Tuning for Transfer Learning with Efficient Parameter and Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14316/) (2023)
- [SHERL: Synthesizing High Accuracy and Efficient Memory for Resource-Limited Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07523/) (2024)
- [Integrating Pre-Trained Speech and Language Models for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03668/) (2023)
- [A Parameter-Efficient Learning Approach to Arabic Dialect Identification with Pre-Trained General-Purpose Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11244/) (2023)
- [Improving Speech Recognition for African American English With Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09996/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dialect Identification (DI) is a task to recognize different dialects within the same language from a speech signal. DI can help to improve the downstream speech related tasks even when speakers have a strong dialect. However, fine-tuning a speech model for tasks like DI is expensive in terms of computation cost and memory requirement. Recent studies have explored fine-tuning pre-trained speech models for tasks like DI using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, which offer parameter efficiency but limited improvement in memory efficiency and training speed. To address these challenges, we explore Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning (MEFT) methods, originally proposed for language processing, and apply them to the general-purpose pre-trained speech model. We then comprehensively analyze the GPU memory usage and fine-tuning speed based on various MEFT methods. As a case study, we fine-tune the Whisper model to identify six Mandarin subdialects from the KeSpeech dataset, reducing GPU memory usage by up to 73.25% and accelerating training speed by a factor of 2.1, while maintaining accuracy comparable to vanilla fine-tuning and PEFT methods.