# DARS: Dysarthria-Aware Rhythm-Style Synthesis for ASR Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01369/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [Style Tokens: Unsupervised Style Modeling, Control and Transfer in End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09017/) (2018)
- [BigVGAN: A Universal Neural Vocoder with Large-Scale Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04658/) (2022)
- [ProDiff: Progressive Fast Diffusion Model For High-Quality Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06389/) (2022)
- [CoMoSpeech: One-Step Speech and Singing Voice Synthesis via Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06908/) (2023)
- [Personalized Fine-Tuning with Controllable Synthetic Speech from LLM-Generated Transcripts for Dysarthric Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12991/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dysarthric speech exhibits abnormal prosody and significant speaker variability, presenting persistent challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR). While text-to-speech (TTS)-based data augmentation has shown potential, existing methods often fail to accurately model the pathological rhythm and acoustic style of dysarthric speech. To address this, we propose DARS, a dysarthria-aware rhythm-style synthesis framework based on the Matcha-TTS architecture. DARS incorporates a multi-stage rhythm predictor optimized by contrastive preferences between normal and dysarthric speech, along with a dysarthric-style conditional flow matching mechanism, jointly enhancing temporal rhythm reconstruction and pathological acoustic style simulation. Experiments on the TORGO dataset demonstrate that DARS achieves a Mean Cepstral Distortion (MCD) of 4.29, closely approximating real dysarthric speech. Adapting a Whisper-based ASR system with synthetic dysarthric speech from DARS achieves a 54.22% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) compared to state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in enhancing recognition performance.