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Conformer-Based Speech Recognition on Extreme Edge-Computing Devices (arxiv.org)
2 points by gok on Apr 2, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A strong streaming speech-recognition network was reshaped—trimmed structure, rewritten computation graph, tuned number precision—to run on tiny devices like smartwatches. On smart wearables it transcribes speech 5.26 times faster than real time with no loss in accuracy.

Abstract · Conformer-Based Speech Recognition On Extreme Edge-Computing Devices

With increasingly more powerful compute capabilities and resources in today's devices, traditionally compute-intensive automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been moving from the cloud to devices to better protect user privacy. However, it is still challenging to implement on-device ASR on resource-constrained devices, such as smartphones, smart wearables, and other smart home automation devices. In this paper, we propose a series of model architecture adaptions, neural network graph transformations, and numerical optimizations to fit an advanced Conformer based end-to-end streaming ASR system on resource-constrained devices without accuracy degradation. We achieve over 5.26 times faster than realtime (0.19 RTF) speech recognition on smart wearables while minimizing energy consumption and achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. The proposed methods are widely applicable to other transformer-based server-free AI applications. In addition, we provide a complete theory on optimal pre-normalizers that numerically stabilize layer normalization in any Lp-norm using any floating point precision.

Mingbin Xu, Alex Jin, Sicheng Wang, Mu Su, Tim Ng, Henry Mason, Shiyi Han, Zhihong Lei, Yaqiao Deng, Zhen Huang, Mahesh Krishnamoorthy
arXiv:2312.10359 · cs.LG, cs.PF · submitted Dec 16, 2023 · updated May 13, 2024
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