# Speech Emotion Recognition Leveraging OpenAI's Whisper Representations and Attentive Pooling Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [Emotion Recognition from Speech Using Wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03502/) (2021)
- [Attentive Statistics Pooling for Deep Speaker Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10963/) (2018)
- [HiGRU: Hierarchical Gated Recurrent Units for Utterance-level Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04446/) (2019)
- [EmoBox: Multilingual Multi-corpus Speech Emotion Recognition Toolkit and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07162/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Emotion Recognition via Attention Gated Hierarchical Memory Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09075/) (2019)
- [ShEMO -- A Large-Scale Validated Database for Persian Speech Emotion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01155/) (2019)
- [Foundation Model Assisted Automatic Speech Emotion Recognition: Transcribing, Annotating, and Augmenting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08108/) (2023)
- [MFHCA: Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition Via Multi-Spatial Fusion and Hierarchical Cooperative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13509/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Study of ASR Adaptation and Representation Dimensionality Reduction in Persian Speech Emotion Recognition Using Whisper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05165/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) research has faced limitations due to the lack of standard and sufficiently large datasets. Recent studies have leveraged pre-trained models to extract features for downstream tasks such as SER. This work explores the capabilities of Whisper, a pre-trained ASR system, in speech emotion recognition by proposing two attention-based pooling methods, Multi-head Attentive Average Pooling and QKV Pooling, designed to efficiently reduce the dimensionality of Whisper representations while preserving emotional features. We experiment on English and Persian, using the IEMOCAP and ShEMO datasets respectively, with Whisper Tiny and Small. Our multi-head QKV architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the ShEMO dataset, with a 2.47% improvement in unweighted accuracy. We further compare the performance of different Whisper encoder layers and find that intermediate layers often perform better for SER on the Persian dataset, providing a lightweight and efficient alternative to much larger models such as HuBERT X-Large. Our findings highlight the potential of Whisper as a representation extractor for SER and demonstrate the effectiveness of attention-based pooling for dimension reduction.