Investigating Training Strategies and Model Robustness of Low-Rank
  Adaptation for Language Modeling in Speech Recognition
Yu Yu Chao-Han Huck Yang Tuan Dinh Sungho Ryu Jari Kolehmainen Roger Ren Denis Filimonov Prashanth G. Shivakumar Ankur Gandhe Ariya Rastow Jia Xu Ivan Bulyko Andreas Stolcke
The use of low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with frozen pretrained language models
(PLMs) has become increasing popular as a mainstream, resource-efficient
modeling approach for memory-constrained hardware. In this study, we first
explore how to enhance model performance by introducing various LoRA training
strategies, achieving relative word error rate reductions of 3.50\% on the
public Librispeech dataset and of 3.67\% on an internal dataset in the
messaging domain. To further characterize the stability of LoRA-based
second-pass speech recognition models, we examine robustness against input
perturbations. These perturbations are rooted in homophone replacements and a
novel metric called N-best Perturbation-based Rescoring Robustness (NPRR), both
designed to measure the relative degradation in the performance of rescoring
models. Our experimental results indicate that while advanced variants of LoRA,
such as dynamic rank-allocated LoRA, lead to performance degradation in
$1$-best perturbation, they alleviate the degradation in $N$-best perturbation.
This finding is in comparison to fully-tuned models and vanilla LoRA tuning
baselines, suggesting that a comprehensive selection is needed when using
LoRA-based adaptation for compute-cost savings and robust language modeling.