How to get the best and fairest performance out of your ASR system using activation steering
Activation steering for ASR systems is an underexplored technique in improving both ASR performance and demographic fairness. We investigate two forms of activation steering: paired activation subtraction, and supervised optimization. We find the former to be ineffective at ameliorating ASR performance whatsoever, while the latter is quite effective at deriving steering vectors (SVs) that improve at once overall ASR performance and demographic fairness along such diverse axes as gender, age, and dialect. We also explore what types of data---from the most to the least personal---are necessary for calculating or training SVs. First, we show significant performance in performance from traini...
| Authors | Felix Herron, Alex Colagrande, Solange Rossato et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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