VOX-KRIKRI: Unifying Speech and Language through Continuous Fusion

We present a multimodal fusion framework that bridges pre-trained decoder-based large language models (LLM) and acoustic encoder-decoder architectures such as Whisper, with the aim of building speech-enabled LLMs. Instead of directly using audio embeddings, we explore an intermediate audio-conditioned text space as a more effective mechanism for alignment. Our method operates fully in continuous text representation spaces, fusing Whisper's hidden decoder states with those of an LLM through cross-modal attention, and supports both offline and streaming modes. We introduce \textit{VoxKrikri}, the first Greek speech LLM, and show through analysis that our approach effectively aligns representations across modalities. These results highlight continuous space fusion as a promising path for multilingual and low-resource speech LLMs, while achieving state-of-the-art results for Automatic Speech Recognition in Greek, providing an average $\sim20\%$ relative improvement across benchmarks.

MSDA: Combining Pseudo-labeling and Self-Supervision for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in ASR

In this work, we investigate the Meta PL unsupervised domain adaptation framework for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We introduce a Multi-Stage Domain Adaptation pipeline (MSDA), a sample-efficient, two-stage adaptation approach that integrates self-supervised learning with semi-supervised techniques. MSDA is designed to enhance the robustness and generalization of ASR models, making them more adaptable to diverse conditions. It is particularly effective for low-resource languages like Greek and in weakly supervised scenarios where labeled data is scarce or noisy. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Meta PL can be applied effectively to ASR tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods, and providing more robust solutions for unsupervised domain adaptation in ASR. Our ablations highlight the necessity of utilizing a cascading approach when combining self-supervision with self-training.