@inproceedings{nachesa-etal-2026-face,
title = "You Have a Face for Radio: Bias in Multimodal Speech Recognition Models",
author = "Nachesa, Maya K. and
Niculae, Vlad and
Gautam, Vagrant",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2681/",
pages = "60970--60981",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "As large neural models have become better at language tasks, researchers are increasingly building multi- and omnimodal models that handle more than one modality of data. One example is the expansion of speech recognition models to audio-visual data, the goal being noise mitigation and multimodal subtitling. While performance and bias have been studied extensively in the single-modality regime, it is unknown how new modalities affect this, even though they produce biases in humans. We therefore propose the first bias evaluation of multimodal speech recognition, where we create videos pairing different faces with the same audio using lip-sync, and measure changes in speech transcription accuracy. We find large quality-of-service differences across mWhisper-Flamingo and Gemini models, with drops of up to 4.05 word error rate points, across self-declared gender, ethnicity, and their intersection. Our findings point to a priority for developers to evaluate, fix, and communicate such limitations, as providing more signals through additional modalities is not necessarily better, and may even lead to biased outcomes."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T You Have a Face for Radio: Bias in Multimodal Speech Recognition Models
%A Nachesa, Maya K.
%A Niculae, Vlad
%A Gautam, Vagrant
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F nachesa-etal-2026-face
%X As large neural models have become better at language tasks, researchers are increasingly building multi- and omnimodal models that handle more than one modality of data. One example is the expansion of speech recognition models to audio-visual data, the goal being noise mitigation and multimodal subtitling. While performance and bias have been studied extensively in the single-modality regime, it is unknown how new modalities affect this, even though they produce biases in humans. We therefore propose the first bias evaluation of multimodal speech recognition, where we create videos pairing different faces with the same audio using lip-sync, and measure changes in speech transcription accuracy. We find large quality-of-service differences across mWhisper-Flamingo and Gemini models, with drops of up to 4.05 word error rate points, across self-declared gender, ethnicity, and their intersection. Our findings point to a priority for developers to evaluate, fix, and communicate such limitations, as providing more signals through additional modalities is not necessarily better, and may even lead to biased outcomes.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2681/
%P 60970-60981
Markdown (Informal)
[You Have a Face for Radio: Bias in Multimodal Speech Recognition Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2681/) (Nachesa et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL