A Practical Recipe for Semi-Supervised Federated ASR: Online Pseudo-Labels with Server Update Stabilization

Apple Machine LearningSeptember 24, 2026en

Apple Machine Learning

AI Global Wire

Semi-supervised federated learning (SSFL) trains models on clients’ unlabeled data using a teacher to generate pseudo-labels, with a small labeled seed dataset on the server. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is particularly fragile here: pseudo-label errors compound across the output sequence and across training rounds into divergence, leaving a large gap to fully-supervised FL. We show that closing this gap turns on two coupled design axes—the teacher (which model generates the pseudo-labels) and the anchor (the server-side updates on labeled data that stabilize training). On the teacher…

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