2024.naacl-industry.12@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Conformer-Based Speech Recognition On Extreme Edge-Computing Devices [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Mingbin Xu ; Alex Jin ; Sicheng Wang ; Mu Su ; Tim Ng ; Henry Mason ; Shiyi Han ; Zhihong Lei ; Yaqiao Deng ; Zhen Huang ; Mahesh Krishnamoorthy

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 small 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 small 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.