Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2406.18862

Streaming Decoder-Only Automatic Speech Recognition with Discrete Speech Units: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Unified speech-text models like SpeechGPT, VioLA, and AudioPaLM have shown impressive performance across various speech-related tasks, especially in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). These models typically adopt a unified method to model discrete speech and text tokens, followed by training a decoder-only transformer. However, they are all designed for non-streaming ASR tasks, where the entire speech utterance is needed during decoding. Hence, we introduce a decoder-only model exclusively designed for streaming recognition, incorporating a dedicated boundary token to facilitate streaming recognition and employing causal attention masking during the training phase. Furthermore, we introduce right-chunk attention and various data augmentation techniques to improve the model's contextual modeling abilities. While achieving streaming speech recognition, experiments on the AISHELL-1 and -2 datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of our streaming approach with non-streaming decoder-only counterparts.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Peikun Chen, Sining Sun, Changhao Shan, Qing Yang, Lei Xie. 2024-06-27. Streaming Decoder-Only Automatic Speech Recognition with Discrete Speech Units: A Pilot Study. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18862

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 Technical Report

Recently, large language model (LLM) based ASR models have achieved significant progress, yet they generally lack support for multi-speaker scenarios, where the cocktail party problem remains a critical bottleneck for further advancing ASR. Existing TS-ASR methods, including end-to-end architectures with speaker embeddings and latest LLM-based explorations suffer from degraded single-speaker performance and the inability to reject when the target speaker is absent. In this paper, we propose Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, an LLM-based end-to-end TS-ASR architecture. By utilizing reference speech as voiceprint prompts, it directly transcribes the target speaker's speech without requiring speech separation. Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 maintains competitive performance in single-speaker scenarios, comparable to mainstream ASR models. It also features a negative sample rejection capability, outputting empty text when the target speaker is absent from the mixed speech. Additionally, Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 supports a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mode to provide explicit reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on various synthetic and real-world multispeaker benchmarks demonstrate that Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the cocktail party problem through a unified architecture that balances multispeaker and single-speaker recognition accuracy, along with rejection capability.

cs.SD

EConv-TasNet: Efficient Conv-TasNet for Effective Speech Separation

Conv-TasNet has served as a strong baseline for time-domain speech separation, and many studies have extended it with advanced architectures such as dual-path networks, U-Nets, and attention mechanisms. However, these methods often introduce high computational cost and complexity, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. To address this issue, we propose eConv-TasNet, an efficient variant of Conv-TasNet that improves both effectiveness and efficiency without relying on resource-intensive modules. The proposed model consists of a group-wise early-splitting (GES) module and a multi-group feature aggregation (MGFA) module. GES generates discriminative speaker embeddings at intermediate stages, while MGFA progressively aggregates these group-level representations for refined mask estimation. Experimental results show that eConv-TasNet reduces model size by 22.4%, accelerates inference by 18.9%, and improves SI-SNRi by 14.0%-28.0% across three public benchmarks. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and lower inference cost. These results demonstrate a favorable efficiency-effectiveness trade-off for edge deployment.

cs.SD