C-TriLoRA: Cross-Corpus Kazakh SER via Tri-Factor LoRA and CORAL

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) in low-resource languages deals with the scarcity of labeled corpora and the instability of learned representations when transferred across diverse recording conditions and speaker demographics. This study introduces Conditional Tri-Factor Low-Rank Adaptation (C-TRILORA), a multi-task architecture that jointly performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) and SER on Kazakh speech while generalizing reliably across corpora. The proposed model extends a pre-trained Whisper encoder–decoder back-bone through three primary innovations: a Tri-LoRA routing module that disentangles lexical, emotional, and speaker latent factors; CORAL domain alignment that matches second-order statistics between source and target domains without target labels; and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) that suppresses speaker-identity information. Experimental evaluations on the KazEmoTTS and ENU KEMO datasets demonstrate that C-TRILORA achieves a competitive in-domain Macro-F1 of 86.09%and significantly outperforms standard baselines in cross-corpus conditions (41.44% Macro-F1 versus 37.34% for the Shared-Head baseline). McNemar and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirm that explicit factor disentanglement is essential for cross-corpus robustness. These results show that separating speech components effectively mitigates negative transfer, making C-TRILORA a practical approach for low-resource SER deployment.