LaSR: Context-Aware Speech Recognition via Latent Reasoning

Speech recognition in specialized domains requires leveraging contextual or topical information to improve the recognition of domain-specific entities. Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) have substantially advanced speech understanding and reasoning capabilities, making context-aware speech recognition possible without predefined bias lists. In this paper, we propose LaSR (Latent Speech Reasoning), a novel training paradigm featuring a context-aware reasoning trajectory that leverages the latent reasoning process. Instead of generating explicit intermediate tokens, LaSR aligns chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision around the acoustic feature region of the target word, and introduces latent reasoning periods for context information grounding and transcriptional transition. Furthermore, to effectively benchmark context-aware speech recognition, we propose Spoken Darwin-Science, a large-scale corpus focusing on academic terminologies. Preliminary experiments on Fun-Audio-Chat demonstrate that LaSR significantly improves terminology recognition without introducing additional latency and consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning baselines. Our findings highlight the potential of latent reasoning in building efficient, context-aware speech assistants.