In-Context Adaptation of Encoder-Decoder Models in Speech Recognition

In-context learning offers an appealing approach to adapt automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to new speakers, accents, and domains by providing speech-text pairs as demonstrations at inference time. Recent work shows that some LLM-based speech models are capable of ASR in-context adaptation, when providing interleaved speech-text demonstrations. In this work, we ask whether in-context adaptation is an inherent ability for all encoder-decoder models. We study two forms of demonstration, collated and interleaved demonstration, across six encoder-decoder models, spanning conventional cross-attention-based and LLM-based architectures. We find that all tested models are able to perform in-context adaptation out of the box, achieving up to 30% relative improvement in the oracle experiments and up to 23% using first-pass hypotheses. Through controlled experiments on three English datasets, we show that lexical and speaker information both contribute to successful adaptation. While interleaved demonstration is effective in certain cases, collated demonstration brings consistent adaptation across the board. Our results suggest that in-context adaptation for ASR is not unique to specific architectures, training, or demonstration approaches.