Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on unseen tasks in English, but their abilities in non-English languages are less explored due to limited benchmarks and training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Indic-QA Benchmark, a large dataset for context-grounded question answering in 11 major Indian languages, covering both extractive and abstractive tasks. Evaluations of multilingual LLMs, including instruction fine-tuned versions, revealed weak performance in low-resource languages due to a strong English-language bias in their training data. We also investigated the Translate-Test paradigm,where inputs are translated to English for processing and the results are translated back into the source language for output. This approach outperformed multilingual LLMs, particularly in low-resource settings. By releasing Indic-QA, we aim to promote further research into LLMs’ question-answering capabilities in low-resource languages. This benchmark offers a critical resource to address existing limitations and foster multilingual understanding.

Despite the impressive performance of ASR models on mainstream benchmarks, their performance on rare words is unsatisfactory. In enterprise settings, often a focused list of entities (such as locations, names, etc) are available which can be used to adapt the model to the terminology of specific domains. In this paper, we present a novel inference algorithm that improves the prediction of state-of-the-art ASR models using nearest-neighbor-based matching on an inference-time word list. We consider both the Transducer architecture that is useful in the streaming setting, and state-of-the-art encoder-decoder models such as Whisper. In our approach, a list of rare entities is indexed in a memory by synthesizing speech for each entry, and then storing the internal acoustic and language model states obtained from the best possible alignment on the ASR model. The memory is organized as a trie which we harness to perform a stateful lookup during inference. A key property of our extension is that we prevent spurious matches by restricting to only word-level matches. In our experiments on publicly available datasets and private benchmarks, we show that our method is effective in significantly improving rare word recognition.

Training state-of-the-art ASR systems such as RNN-T often has a high associated financial and environmental cost. Training with a subset of training data could mitigate this problem if the subset selected could achieve on-par performance with training with the entire dataset. Although there are many data subset selection(DSS) algorithms, direct application to the RNN-T is difficult, especially the DSS algorithms that are adaptive and use learning dynamics such as gradients, as RNN-T tend to have gradients with a significantly larger memory footprint. In this paper, we propose Partitioned Gradient Matching (PGM) a novel distributable DSS algorithm, suitable for massive datasets like those used to train RNN-T. Through extensive experiments on Librispeech 100H and Librispeech 960H, we show that PGM achieves between 3x to 6x speedup with only a very small accuracy degradation (under 1% absolute WER difference). In addition, we demonstrate similar results for PGM even in settings where the training data is corrupted with noise.

Semantic parsing over multiple knowledge bases enables a parser to exploit structural similarities of programs across the multiple domains. However, the fundamental challenge lies in obtaining high-quality annotations of (utterance, program) pairs across various domains needed for training such models. To overcome this, we propose a novel framework to build a unified multi-domain enabled semantic parser trained only with weak supervision (denotations). Weakly supervised training is particularly arduous as the program search space grows exponentially in a multi-domain setting. To solve this, we incorporate a multi-policy distillation mechanism in which we first train domain-specific semantic parsers (teachers) using weak supervision in the absence of the ground truth programs, followed by training a single unified parser (student) from the domain specific policies obtained from these teachers. The resultant semantic parser is not only compact but also generalizes better, and generates more accurate programs. It further does not require the user to provide a domain label while querying. On the standard Overnight dataset (containing multiple domains), we demonstrate that the proposed model improves performance by 20% in terms of denotation accuracy in comparison to baseline techniques.