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Too Good to Be True: A Study on Modern Automatic Speech Recognition for the Evaluation of Speech Enhancement
Danilo de Oliveira, Tal Peer, Timo Gerkmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12107
arXiv:2605.12107v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speech enhancement (SE) systems are typically evaluated using a variety of instrumental metrics. The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to evaluate SE performance is common in literature, usually in terms of word error rate (WER). However, WER scores depend heavily on the choice of ASR system and text normalization pipeline. In this paper, we investigate how modern ASR models correlate with human recognition of enhanced speech. A listening experiment reveals that modern ASR models with large-scale noisy training and embedded language models correlate more with human WER than simpler ones, with a transducer model providing the most reliable transcriptions. Nevertheless, we also show that these models' robustness to noise and use of context can be uninformative to an acoustics-focused evaluation of enhancement performance.
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An iterative Ising decoder for quantum error correction codes
Yuanqi Liu, Weilei Zeng, Peixiang Li, Yantong Liu, Guangyao Huang, Yingwen Liu, Dongyang Wang, Junjie Wu, Lingling Lao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12301 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.12301 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.12301
arXiv:2606.12301v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Ising framework maps the decoding problem in quantum error correction onto ground-state optimization of a classical Hamiltonian, in which $X$-$Z$ error correlations enter as cross terms. Under phenomenological depolarizing noise, the exact joint formulation contains up to 8-body interactions for the toric code and 10-body for the $6.6.6$ color code. These high-order terms degrade solver convergence, inflate runtime, and raise the auxiliary spin overhead when embedding into native 2-body Ising hardware. In this work, we propose the iterative low-order decoding (ILOD) algorithm, which alternates between $X$- and $Z$-type sub-Hamiltonians, approximating cross-type correlations through Bayesian priors that reweight each type's couplings using the other type's inferred error configuration. This halves the maximum body count of interaction terms in the Hamiltonian, accelerating the solver, restoring convergence at larger code distances, and reducing the total spin count for 2-body embedding by a factor of $2.5$. For the toric code, ILOD attains a threshold of $4.73%$ versus $4.83%$ for the joint formulation, with the empirical runtime ratio scaling as $(0.81)^d$. For the $6.6.6$ color code, their thresholds agree within statistical uncertainty for small code distances, and ILOD remains convergent for larger distances where the joint formulation fails to converge despite a larger annealing budget.
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