Three-in-One: Fast and Accurate Transducer for Hybrid-Autoregressive ASR

Hainan Xu, Travis M. Bartley, Vladimir Bataev, Boris Ginsburg

Keywords: speech recognition, sequence modeling, non-autoregressive models, RNN-T, Transducers

TL;DR: We introduce a novel speech recognition model that supports different levels of autoregression, achieving better speed-accuracy tradeoff than alternative methods.

Abstract: We present Hybrid-Autoregressive INference TrANsducers (HAINAN), a novel architecture for speech recognition that extends the Token-and-Duration Transducer (TDT) model. Trained with randomly masked predictor network outputs, HAINAN supports both autoregressive inference with all network components and non-autoregressive inference without the predictor. Additionally, we propose a novel semi-autoregressive inference method that first generates an initial hypothesis using non-autoregressive inference, followed by refinement steps where each token prediction is regenerated using parallelized autoregression on the initial hypothesis. Experiments on multiple datasets across different languages demonstrate that HAINAN achieves efficiency parity with CTC in non-autoregressive mode and with TDT in autoregressive mode. In terms of accuracy, autoregressive HAINAN achieves parity with TDT and RNN-T, while non-autoregressive HAINAN significantly outperforms CTC. Semi-autoregressive inference further enhances the model's accuracy with minimal computational overhead, and even outperforms TDT results in some cases. These results highlight HAINAN's flexibility in balancing accuracy and speed, positioning it as a strong candidate for real-world speech recognition applications.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

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Submission Number: 8160