PUMA: Projected Universal Multilingual ASR for Low-Resource Settings. Application to Diverse African Languages

Multilingual ASR systems often fail to generalize to low-resource and linguistically diverse languages while remaining costly to scale. We introduce PUMA, a unified multilingual ASR model that improves low-resource performance with reduced model complexity. PUMA employs a Universal Language Projection (ULP) module that integrates a learnable language token with acoustic representations, enabling language-aware processing through shared parameters. Experiments on diverse African languages show consistent word error rate reductions over strong multilingual baselines, highlighting improved robustness and generalization. Our code is available at the following GitHub URL: https://github.com/ ilyes-okd/PUMA