Effective User-defined Keyword Spotting with Dual-stage Matching, Multi-modal Enrollment, and Continual Adaptation
About
User-defined keyword spotting (KWS) is crucial for personalized voice interaction, yet existing methods face several challenges: (1) insufficient discriminability among confusable words, (2) performance inconsistency across speakers with varying pronunciations, and (3) high data cost to ensure reliable wake-word performance. In this paper, we introduce DMA-KWS, an efficient and robust framework for user-defined keyword spotting. First, it adopts a dual-stage matching pipeline: CTC decoding with streaming phoneme search to locate candidate segments, followed by QbyT with a phoneme matcher for fine-grained verification, enabling it to better distinguish confusable words. Next, multi-modal enrollment fuses user-specific speech with text embeddings to further improve accuracy for registered users. Finally, a parameter-efficient continual adaptation mechanism performs lightweight updates using synthetic and real data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DMA-KWS. On the LibriPhrase Hard subset, it achieves 97.85% AUC and 6.13% EER, reaching state-of-the-art performance. In speaker-dependent settings, DMA-KWS consistently outperforms text-only enrollment, demonstrating significant performance gains. Moreover, the proposed parameter-efficient fine-tuning mechanism adapts DMA-KWS with only 187k updated parameters, further enhancing KWS performance while ensuring suitability for on-device deployment.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword Spotting | LibriPhrase Easy (LPE) | EER0.45 | 46 | |
| Speaker-Independent Keyword Spotting | LibriPhrase hard | AUROC97.85 | 21 | |
| Speaker-Independent Keyword Spotting | Google Speech Commands (GSC) | AUROC99.21 | 12 | |
| Speaker-Independent Keyword Spotting | Qualcomm Keyword Speech (Qcomm) | AUROC99.9 | 10 | |
| Wake-up Word detection | Hey-Snips | Recall @ FAR 0.599.84 | 10 |