ASR Personalization in Pathological Voice: Accuracy, Efficiency, and Duration Effects

Giuseppe Giaimis, Sergei Katkov, Muhammad Azfar Yaqub, Antonio Liotta

Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) struggles with Pathological speech due to persistent speaker-specific mismatch. In clinical and accessibility scenarios, only limited target-speaker data is typically available, making full model retraining impractical. We present a component-level analysis of LoRA adaptation in Whisper, investigating how adapter placement interacts with the model size, training efficiency and utterance-duration in single-speaker settings. Our experimental comparative study shows that while scaling reduces errors, it does not eliminate mismatch. Furthermore, the full attention LoRa provides the most reliable accuracy, and the best time--accuracy trade-off. Improvements vary across utterance length, with medium-length recordings benefiting the most, while short and long utterances remain challenging. These findings highlight the importance of adaptation placement and duration-dependent evaluation, under challenging, data-scarce personalization scenarios.