@inproceedings{kolluri-etal-2026-pruning,
title = "Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-{LLM}s",
author = "Kolluri, Ganesh Pavan Kartikeya Bharadwaj and
Kampouridis, Michael and
Shekhar, Ravi",
editor = "Shekhar, Ravi and
Swain, Monorama and
Mishra, Jagabandhu and
Dhar, Sandipan and
Mouratidis, Haralambos and
Purver, Matthew",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the {IMPACT}-{SPEECH} Workshop: Identifying, Measuring, Preventing, and Assessing Consequences of Bias in Speech {LLM}s",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.impactspeech-1.7/",
pages = "67--80",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-479-8",
abstract = "Speech-LLMs are expensive to run, making compression important for real-world deployment. However, compressed models are usually selected using aggregate word error rate (WER), which can hide how pruning affects different demographic groups. In this work, we systematically study the effect of audio encoder pruning on SLAM-ASR for different demographic groups. Using the Fair-Speech and Common Voice datasets, we found that the pruning does not affect all demographic groups equally; the gap between best- and worstperforming groups increases in fold. These disparities appear across all three encoder scales, but only the largest model initially hides them behind aggregate WER. LoRA adaptation improves WER for every group, but benefits groups already performing well more strongly and widens for certain groups. On Common Voice English, Danish, and Dutch, accent gaps persist but do not clearly widen, showing that the fairness effects of pruning vary across datasets and must be measured directly. Our findings suggest that for pruned models, deployment decisions should include per-group WER, with the worst-performing group{'}s error rate as an explicit criterion."
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<abstract>Speech-LLMs are expensive to run, making compression important for real-world deployment. However, compressed models are usually selected using aggregate word error rate (WER), which can hide how pruning affects different demographic groups. In this work, we systematically study the effect of audio encoder pruning on SLAM-ASR for different demographic groups. Using the Fair-Speech and Common Voice datasets, we found that the pruning does not affect all demographic groups equally; the gap between best- and worstperforming groups increases in fold. These disparities appear across all three encoder scales, but only the largest model initially hides them behind aggregate WER. LoRA adaptation improves WER for every group, but benefits groups already performing well more strongly and widens for certain groups. On Common Voice English, Danish, and Dutch, accent gaps persist but do not clearly widen, showing that the fairness effects of pruning vary across datasets and must be measured directly. Our findings suggest that for pruned models, deployment decisions should include per-group WER, with the worst-performing group’s error rate as an explicit criterion.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMs
%A Kolluri, Ganesh Pavan Kartikeya Bharadwaj
%A Kampouridis, Michael
%A Shekhar, Ravi
%Y Shekhar, Ravi
%Y Swain, Monorama
%Y Mishra, Jagabandhu
%Y Dhar, Sandipan
%Y Mouratidis, Haralambos
%Y Purver, Matthew
%S Proceedings of the IMPACT-SPEECH Workshop: Identifying, Measuring, Preventing, and Assessing Consequences of Bias in Speech LLMs
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-479-8
%F kolluri-etal-2026-pruning
%X Speech-LLMs are expensive to run, making compression important for real-world deployment. However, compressed models are usually selected using aggregate word error rate (WER), which can hide how pruning affects different demographic groups. In this work, we systematically study the effect of audio encoder pruning on SLAM-ASR for different demographic groups. Using the Fair-Speech and Common Voice datasets, we found that the pruning does not affect all demographic groups equally; the gap between best- and worstperforming groups increases in fold. These disparities appear across all three encoder scales, but only the largest model initially hides them behind aggregate WER. LoRA adaptation improves WER for every group, but benefits groups already performing well more strongly and widens for certain groups. On Common Voice English, Danish, and Dutch, accent gaps persist but do not clearly widen, showing that the fairness effects of pruning vary across datasets and must be measured directly. Our findings suggest that for pruned models, deployment decisions should include per-group WER, with the worst-performing group’s error rate as an explicit criterion.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.impactspeech-1.7/
%P 67-80
Markdown (Informal)
[Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.impactspeech-1.7/) (Kolluri et al., IMPACT-SPEECH 2026)
ACL