# Universal Robust Speech Adaptation for Cross-Domain Speech Recognition and Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04307/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Magnitude Masking for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07454/) (2018)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [A DIRT-T Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08735/) (2018)
- [Real Time Speech Enhancement in the Waveform Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12847/) (2020)
- [SEGAN: Speech Enhancement Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09452/) (2017)
- [Improved Noisy Student Training for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09629/) (2020)
- [MetricGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks based Black-box Metric Scores Optimization for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04874/) (2019)
- [Self-training and Pre-training are Complementary for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11430/) (2020)
- [SpeechStew: Simply Mix All Available Speech Recognition Data to Train One Large Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02133/) (2021)
- [An Investigation of Incorporating Mamba for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06573/) (2024)
- [StarGANv2-VC: A Diverse, Unsupervised, Non-parallel Framework for Natural-Sounding Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10394/) (2021)
- [MP-SENet: A Speech Enhancement Model with Parallel Denoising of Magnitude and Phase Spectra](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13686/) (2023)
- [PHASEN: A Phase-and-Harmonics-Aware Speech Enhancement Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04697/) (2019)
- [Squeezeformer: An Efficient Transformer for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00888/) (2022)
- [MFA-Conformer: Multi-scale Feature Aggregation Conformer for Automatic Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15249/) (2022)
- [CMGAN: Conformer-based Metric GAN for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15149/) (2022)
- [Reproducing Whisper-Style Training Using an Open-Source Toolkit and Publicly Available Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13876/) (2023)
- [OWSM-CTC: An Open Encoder-Only Speech Foundation Model for Speech Recognition, Translation, and Language Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12654/) (2024)
- [Transfer Learning for Speech and Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06066/) (2015)
- [Noise-robust Speech Recognition with 10 Minutes Unparalleled In-domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15321/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech enhancement (SE) have exhibited remarkable capabilities under matched noise and channel conditions. However, these models often suffer from severe performance degradation when confronted with domain shifts, particularly in the presence of unseen noise and channel distortions. In view of this, we in this paper present URSA-GAN, a unified and domain-aware generative framework specifically designed to mitigate mismatches in both noise and channel conditions. URSA-GAN leverages a dual-embedding architecture that consists of a noise encoder and a channel encoder, each pre-trained with limited in-domain data to capture domain-relevant representations. These embeddings condition a GAN-based speech generator, facilitating the synthesis of speech that is acoustically aligned with the target domain while preserving phonetic content. To enhance generalization further, we propose dynamic stochastic perturbation, a novel regularization technique that introduces controlled variability into the embeddings during generation, promoting robustness to unseen domains. Empirical results demonstrate that URSA-GAN effectively reduces character error rates in ASR and improves perceptual metrics in SE across diverse noisy and mismatched channel scenarios. Notably, evaluations on compound test conditions with both channel and noise degradations confirm the generalization ability of URSA-GAN, yielding relative improvements of 16.16% in ASR performance and 15.58% in SE metrics.
