GigaAM Multilingual: Foundation Model for Underrepresented Languages
Andrei Kuzmenko, Alexandr Maximenko, Aleksandr Kutsakov, Georgii Gospodinov, Dmitrii Bolotov, Oleg Kutuzov, Pavel Bogomolov, Fyodor Minkin
This paper develops a multilingual speech recognition model for underrepresented languages, addressing the issue of data scarcity and uneven performance, and shows promising results in controlled comparisons.
Abstract
Despite recent scaling successes, multilingual ASR performance remains highly uneven, with long-tail languages suffering from severe data scarcity. This work addresses the challenge of building robust foundation models for underrepresented Central Asian languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek). We present GigaAM Multilingual, a Conformer encoder pre-trained on 2M hours of audio using a HuBERT-style objective. Crucially, we introduce a cluster-level data balancing strategy during pre-training and a domain-aware sampling method during fine-tuning to mitigate head-language dominance. In controlled comparisons, our approach outperforms strong open pretrained encoders (Whisper Large v3, Omnilingual-1B) on target languages, achieving significant gains on spontaneous speech while maintaining efficiency. We release the foundation encoder and ASR model, offering a proven recipe for effective multilingual adaptation under realistic data imbalance.