Training
- Base model: openai/whisper-small (244M params)
- Method: full fine-tune (every weight)
- Learning rate: 3e-5, linear schedule, 500 warmup steps
- Batch size: 64 (effective)
- Epochs: 5
- Hardware: AMD Instinct MI300X (ROCm)
- Data:
stratified_v6 — 123,205 train / 15,763 validation / 15,860 test rows, speaker-disjoint. v6 canonicalizes ~2,954 word instances (letter-level spelling, ZWJ/rakaransaya conjuncts, word-level register pairs, and English typos in code-switched references) relative to stratified_v5.
Results
Table with columns: Split, WER, CER| Split | WER | CER |
|---|
| Validation (final, epoch 5) | 20.15% | 6.23% |
| Test (full, 15,860 rows) | 17.17% | 4.71% |
For comparison, the otherwise-identical model trained on stratified_v5 (same hyperparameters, no data canonicalization) scored 17.15% WER / 4.62% CER on the same test set — essentially a statistical tie. The v6 data cleanup did not produce a measurable test-set improvement at this configuration, despite winning validation WER on 4 of 5 epochs.