English

BUT System for the MLC-SLM Challenge

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-06-17 v1

Abstract

We present a two-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that combines DiCoW -- a diarization-conditioned variant of Whisper -- with DiariZen, a diarization pipeline built on top of Pyannote. We first evaluate both systems in out-of-domain (OOD) multilingual scenarios without any fine-tuning. In this scenario, DiariZen consistently outperforms the baseline Pyannote diarization model, demonstrating strong generalization. Despite being fine-tuned on English-only data for target-speaker ASR, DiCoW retains solid multilingual performance, indicating that encoder modifications preserve Whisper's multilingual capabilities. We then fine-tune both DiCoW and DiariZen on the MLC-SLM challenge data. The fine-tuned DiariZen continues to outperform the fine-tuned Pyannote baseline, while DiCoW sees further gains from domain adaptation. Our final system achieves a micro-average tcpWER/CER of 16.75% and ranks second in Task 2 of the MLC-SLM challenge. Lastly, we identify several labeling inconsistencies in the training data -- such as missing speech segments and incorrect silence annotations -- which can hinder diarization fine-tuning. We propose simple mitigation strategies to address these issues and improve system robustness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.13414,
  title  = {BUT System for the MLC-SLM Challenge},
  author = {Alexander Polok and Jiangyu Han and Dominik Klement and Samuele Cornell and Jan Černocký and Lukáš Burget},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.13414},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:19:33.444Z