New AI Makes Speech Recognition Smarter by Learning Where to Listen

Speech large language models (LLMs) are often built using pretrained acoustic encoders as an audio interface to an LLM decoder. However, LLMs scale poorly with input sequence length, while acoustic encoders tend to produce substantially longer sequences than typical textual inputs.

This motivates learning to compress encoder outputs while preserving task-oriented information. To this end, we introduce ASSET, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework that learns to adaptively compress encoder outputs by first partitioning them into variable-duration segments and then pooling each segment into a continuous audio token.

We use group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) to train a segmenter with task performance feedback and a token-rate penalty. In automatic speech recognition (ASR) experiments, ASSET achieves performance comparable to a transcript-assisted character-boundary oracle with approximately 25% fewer audio tokens on English LibriSpeech, while improving on a phone-boundary oracle at a similar token rate on Mandarin AISHELL. Exploratory experiments on non-ASR tasks further illustrate how learned segmentation changes when the framework is adapted to tasks beyond transcription.