PRL-DAS: Robust Heliox Speech Recognition for Unaligned Low-Resource Data

Speech produced in helium–oxygen (heliox) environments in deep saturation diving exhibits pronounced spectral shifts and temporal distortions, which severely degrade automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems trained on normal-air corpora. Existing studies often adopt a restoration-then-recognition paradigm by training waveform mapping networks on paired heliox/air recordings. However, in realistic low-resource data collection, paired recordings are typically obtained by independent re-reading and are therefore not strictly time-aligned, which makes regression-style restoration more sensitive to pairing errors and increases the risk of front-end distortions. This paper proposes a robust recognition framework for heliox speech, termed PRL-DAS (Physics-informed Resampling and LoRA with Duration-Adaptive Speed). The framework consists of a physics-inspired linear resampling warm start (PhysSpeed), parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and duration-adaptive speed (DAS) inference enhancement. Specifically, we first apply physics-motivated linear resampling as a coarse warm start, and then perform mixed-domain LoRA fine-tuning of a Whisper foundation model to absorb residual non-linear differences. On a corpus of 1048 paired Chinese heliox utterances under leave-one-speaker-out (LOSO) evaluation, using Whisper-Medium as the base model, PhysSpeed followed by mixed-domain LoRA reduces the overall character error rate (CER) from 49.33% with PhysSpeed preprocessing only to 25.79%, while also improving performance on the normal domain. Furthermore, the full PRL-DAS framework applies Soft-DAS, a lightweight smooth schedule motivated by duration-dependent variation in the optimal resampling factor, and further reduces the overall CER to 24.37% without additional training cost.