Exploring the Potential of Multimodal LLM with Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal ASR

Abstract: Recent advancements in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have made significant progress in integrating information across various modalities, yet real-world applications in educational and scientific domains remain challenging. This paper introduces the Multimodal Scientific ASR (MS-ASR) task, which focuses on transcribing scientific conference videos by leveraging visual information from slides to enhance the accuracy of technical terminologies. Realized that traditional metrics like WER fall short in assessing performance accurately, prompting the proposal of severity-aware WER (SWER) that considers the content type and severity of ASR errors. We propose the Scientific Vision Augmented ASR (SciVASR) framework as a baseline method, enabling MLLMs to improve transcript quality through post-editing. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including GPT-4o, show a 45% improvement over speech-only baselines, highlighting the importance of multimodal information integration.