A Self-Refining Framework for Enhancing ASR Using TTS-Synthesized Data

We propose a self-refining framework that enhances ASR performance with only unlabeled datasets. The process starts with an existing ASR model generating pseudo-labels on unannotated speech, which are then used to train a high-fidelity text-to-speech (TTS) system. Then, synthesized speech text pairs are bootstrapped into the original ASR system, completing the closed-loop self-improvement cycle. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the framework on Taiwanese Mandarin speech. Leveraging 6,000 hours of unlabeled speech, a moderate amount of text data, and synthetic content from the AI models, we adapt Whisper-large-v2 into a specialized model, Twister. Twister reduces error rates by up to 20% on Mandarin and 50% on Mandarin-English code-switching benchmarks compared to Whisper. Results highlight the framework as a compelling alternative to pseudo-labeling self-distillation approaches and provides a practical pathway for improving ASR performance in low-resource or domain-specific settings.

@article{chou2025_2506.11130,
  title={ A Self-Refining Framework for Enhancing ASR Using TTS-Synthesized Data },
  author={ Cheng-Kang Chou and Chan-Jan Hsu and Ho-Lam Chung and Liang-Hsuan Tseng and Hsi-Chun Cheng and Yu-Kuan Fu and Kuan Po Huang and Hung-Yi Lee },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11130},
  year={ 2025 }
}