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Benchmarking Multilingual Speech Models on Pashto: Zero-Shot ASR, Script Failure, and Cross-Domain Evaluation

Hanif Rahman · Apr 6, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics
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How to use this paper page

Coverage: Recent

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Best use

Background context only

Metadata: Recent

Trust level

Low

Signals: Recent

What still needs checking

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Signal confidence: 0.35

Abstract

Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set. This paper reports the first reproducible multi-model evaluation on public Pashto data, covering zero-shot ASR, script-level failure, and cross-domain evaluation of fine-tuned models. For zero-shot ASR, ten models (all seven Whisper sizes, MMS-1B, SeamlessM4T-v2-large, and OmniASR-CTC-300M) are evaluated on the FLEURS Pashto test set and a filtered Common Voice~24 subset; zero-shot Whisper WER ranges from 90% to 297%, with the medium model collapsing to 461% on Common Voice~24 consistent with decoder looping. SeamlessM4T achieves 39.7% WER on Common Voice~24 (the best zero-shot result reported to date, as of submission); MMS-1B achieves 43.8% on FLEURS. For script failure, a language-identification audit shows that no Whisper model produces Pashto-script output in more than 0.8% of utterances, while MMS-1B, SeamlessM4T, and OmniASR each exceed 93% Pashto-script fidelity; WER alone does not reveal this failure, since a model generating Arabic-script output on Pashto audio has not achieved ASR in any interpretable sense. For cross-domain evaluation, five fine-tuned Pashto ASR models are evaluated on both test sets: published WER figures of 14% degrade to 32.5--59% on out-of-distribution sets, while one augmented model achieves 35.1% on both sets with zero cross-domain degradation. Character-class error stratification confirms that Pashto-unique phonemes (the retroflex series and lateral fricatives) account for disproportionate error mass. All evaluations cover read speech only. Five structural impediments to cumulative progress are identified and five ordered research priorities are argued.

Use caution before copying this protocol

Use this page for context, then validate protocol choices against stronger HFEPX references before implementation decisions.

  • Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.
  • Extraction confidence is 0.35 (below strong-reference threshold).
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

HFEPX Relevance Assessment

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Trust level

Low

Eval-Fit Score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

HFEPX Fit

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence: Low

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What This Page Found In The Paper

Each field below shows whether the signal looked explicit, partial, or missing in the available metadata. Use this to judge what is safe to trust directly and what still needs full-paper validation.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

Evidence snippet: Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Includes extracted eval setup.

Evidence snippet: Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit QC controls found.

Evidence snippet: Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

Confidence: Low Not found

No benchmark anchors detected.

Evidence snippet: Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Reported Metrics

partial

Wer, Jailbreak success rate

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Evidence snippet: For zero-shot ASR, ten models (all seven Whisper sizes, MMS-1B, SeamlessM4T-v2-large, and OmniASR-CTC-300M) are evaluated on the FLEURS Pashto test set and a filtered Common Voice~24 subset; zero-shot Whisper WER ranges from 90% to 297%, with the medium model collapsing to 461% on Common Voice~24 consistent with decoder looping.

Rater Population

missing

Unknown

Confidence: Low Not found

Rater source not explicitly reported.

Evidence snippet: Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: Multilingual
  • Signal basis: Structured extraction plus abstract evidence.

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Signal confidence: 0.35
  • Known cautions: low_signal, possible_false_positive

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

werjailbreak success rate

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.
  • This paper reports the first reproducible multi-model evaluation on public Pashto data, covering zero-shot ASR, script-level failure, and cross-domain evaluation of fine-tuned models.
  • For zero-shot ASR, ten models (all seven Whisper sizes, MMS-1B, SeamlessM4T-v2-large, and OmniASR-CTC-300M) are evaluated on the FLEURS Pashto test set and a filtered Common Voice~24 subset; zero-shot Whisper WER ranges from 90% to 297%, with the medium model collapsing to 461% on Common Voice~24 consistent with decoder looping.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.
  • This paper reports the first reproducible multi-model evaluation on public Pashto data, covering zero-shot ASR, script-level failure, and cross-domain evaluation of fine-tuned models.
  • For cross-domain evaluation, five fine-tuned Pashto ASR models are evaluated on both test sets: published WER figures of 14% degrade to 32.5--59% on out-of-distribution sets, while one augmented model achieves 35.1% on both sets with zero…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set.
  • For cross-domain evaluation, five fine-tuned Pashto ASR models are evaluated on both test sets: published WER figures of 14% degrade to 32.5--59% on out-of-distribution sets, while one augmented model achieves 35.1% on both sets with zero…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: wer, jailbreak success rate

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Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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