The Anatomy of an ASR Hallucination
ASR systems sometimes produce fluent text that is unrelated to the speech they receive. We view these hallucinations as one possible consequence of a broader grounding failure, in which the transcript is no longer adequately guided by the audio. To understand where this failure becomes possible, we study two independently trained Conformer-Large recognizers - one CTC and one RNN-T - under environmental degradation and speaker-background shift. In both models, the final encoder stage emerges as a critical boundary: bypassing the final block causes divergence on nearly every utterance, whereas bypassing middle blocks has little effect. At this same stage, the representations become more com...
| Authors | Hamees Sayed, Apoorv Singh, Kumar Aman et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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