A study on the impact of region specific data on the performance of Indic ASR

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are widely deployed across linguistically diverse regions, yet their ability to generalize across fine-grained geographic variation remains underexplored. We present a systematic study of cross-district ASR generalization for Indian languages, analyzing the impact of regional variation on performance. Using finetuning as a controlled probe, we train models on speech from a single district and evaluate them on other districts within the same language. We examine trends across multiple train test district pairs and quantify performance differences. To assess geographic effects, we analyze the correlation between WER and inter district distance using two distance measures. Our results show consistent correlations between geographic distance and WER, highlighting the challenges of regional generalization and the need for geographically diverse speech data in ASR development and evaluation in India.

Factors affecting ASR performance: A study using state of the art ASR models in Indic Languages

ASR performance varies across languages, speakers, and recording conditions, yet systematic analysis for Indic languages remain limited. We present a large-scale study of decoded outputs from multiple open-source ASR models evaluated on diverse Indian speech datasets in zero-shot settings. We analyze linguistic, speaker-level, and acoustic factors across Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu, and Marathi. We examine correlations between WER and speaker traits such as average word length, speaking rate, and utterance duration across multiple model dataset pairs. For Hindi, we further analyze audio factors including telephone codecs, bit depth, resampling, and background noise. Results reveal both cross lingual patterns and language-specific sensitivities, showing how speaker behavior and signal processing choices affect ASR robustness in real world Indic scenarios.

Scalable Secure Biometric Authentication without Auxiliary Identifiers

The prevalence of biometric authentication has been on the rise due to its ease of use and elimination of weak passwords. To date, most biometric authentication systems have been designed for on-device authentication of the device owner (e.g., smartphones and laptops). Recently, biometric authentication systems have started to emerge that are designed to authenticate users against cloud databases storing representations of biometrics for large numbers of users (potentially millions), such as those facilitating biometric payments. However, the use of a large cloud database introduces a significant attack vector, as a breach of the database could lead to the compromise of all enrolled users' sensitive biometric data. Indeed, all such existing systems either do not adequately protect against such a breach, or are impractical to deploy and use due to their high computational overhead. In this work, we present a new biometric authentication system that provides provable security guarantees against data breaches, while remaining scalable and performant. To do so, we marry artificial intelligence with advanced cryptographic techniques in a novel fashion, providing several optimizations along the way. Our work is the first to show that real-world scalable privacy-preserving biometric authentication without auxiliary identifiers is feasible, and we believe that it will spur widespread industrial adoption and further research in this area.