Select or Rewrite: Oracle-Guided Fine-Tuning for Generative ASR Post-Editing from N-Best Hypotheses

Abstract

Large language models can post-edit ASR by using linguistic context to compare N-best hypotheses and rewrite the transcript when needed, often improving WER without retraining the recognizer. However, prompt-only correction is brittle: it may over-edit when top-1 is correct and hallucinate when the reference is absent, and often needs very large models. We propose oracle-guided fine-tuning that turns N-best lists into supervision via three curated pools: corrections (reference in the list but not top-1) to teach selection, regularizers (top-1 correct) to discourage unnecessary rewrites, and hard negatives (reference absent) to suppress hallucination. Fine-tuning on this data provides more effective supervision than random subset fine-tuning for learning a hybrid select-or-rewrite policy, with the clearest gains from around 3B parameters on the proprietary dataset but less conclusive results on CommonVoice, a divergence suggesting that public read-speech text may overlap with LLM pretraining and mask genuine post-editing gains.