Towards domain generalisation in ASR with elitist sampling and ensemble knowledge distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) has widely been used for model compression and domain adaptation for speech applications. In the presence of multiple teachers, knowledge can easily be transferred to the student by averaging the models output. However, previous research shows that the student do not adapt well with such combination. This paper propose to use an elitist sampling strategy at the output of ensemble teacher models to select the best-decoded utterance generated by completely out-of-domain teacher models for generalizing unseen domain. The teacher models are trained on AMI, LibriSpeech and WSJ while the student is adapted for the Switchboard data. The results show that with the selection strategy based on the individual model’s posteriors the student model achieves a better WER compared to all the teachers and baselines with a minimum absolute improvement of about 8.4%. Furthermore, an insights on the model adaptation with out-of-domain data has also been studied via correlation analysis.