Gradient-Based Speech-to-Text Alignment for Any ASR Model: From CTC to Speech LLMs

arXiv:2607.06831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-text alignment means finding the temporal boundaries of each word in the audio. Some models provide such an alignment directly and others do not. Connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and transducer models have an alignment by construction, whereas attention-based encoder-decoders (AED) and speech large language models (LLMs) do not, and their word timings are usually read off the attention weights instead. All of these signals live...