ESPnet-EZ: Python-only ESPnet for Easy Fine-tuning and Integration

We introduce ESPnet-EZ, an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit ESPnet, aimed at quick and easy development of speech models. ESPnet-EZ focuses on two major aspects: (i) easy fine-tuning and inference of existing ESPnet models on various tasks and (ii) easy integration with popular deep neural network frameworks such as PyTorch-Lightning, Hugging Face transformers and datasets, and Lhotse. By replacing ESPnet design choices inherited from Kaldi with a Python-only, Bash-free interface, we dramatically reduce the effort required to build, debug, and use a new model. For example, to fine-tune a speech foundation model, ESPnet-EZ, compared to ESPnet, reduces the number of newly written code by 2.7x and the amount of dependent code by 6.7x while dramatically reducing the Bash script dependencies. The codebase of ESPnet-EZ is publicly available.

Segment-Level Vectorized Beam Search Based on Partially Autoregressive Inference

Attention-based encoder-decoder models with autoregressive (AR) decoding have proven to be the dominant approach for automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to their superior accuracy. However, they often suffer from slow inference. This is primarily attributed to the incremental calculation of the decoder. This work proposes a partially AR framework, which employs segment-level vectorized beam search for improving the inference speed of an ASR model based on the hybrid connectionist temporal classification (CTC) attention-based architecture. It first generates an initial hypothesis using greedy CTC decoding, identifying low-confidence tokens based on their output probabilities. We then utilize the decoder to perform segment-level vectorized beam search on these tokens, re-predicting in parallel with minimal decoder calculations. Experimental results show that our method is 12 to 13 times faster in inference on the LibriSpeech corpus over AR decoding whilst preserving high accuracy.

ESPnet-ONNX: Bridging a Gap Between Research and Production

In the field of deep learning, researchers often focus on inventing novel neural network models and improving benchmarks. In contrast, application developers are interested in making models suitable for actual products, which involves optimizing a model for faster inference and adapting a model to various platforms (e.g., C++ and Python). In this work, to fill the gap between the two, we establish an effective procedure for optimizing a PyTorch-based research-oriented model for deployment, taking ESPnet, a widely used toolkit for speech processing, as an instance. We introduce different techniques to ESPnet, including converting a model into an ONNX format, fusing nodes in a graph, and quantizing parameters, which lead to approximately 1.3-2$\times$ speedup in various tasks (i.e., ASR, TTS, speech translation, and spoken language understanding) while keeping its performance without any additional training. Our ESPnet-ONNX will be publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet_onnx

A Comparative Study on Transformer vs RNN in Speech Applications

Sequence-to-sequence models have been widely used in end-to-end speech processing, for example, automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translation (ST), and text-to-speech (TTS). This paper focuses on an emergent sequence-to-sequence model called Transformer, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in neural machine translation and other natural language processing applications. We undertook intensive studies in which we experimentally compared and analyzed Transformer and conventional recurrent neural networks (RNN) in a total of 15 ASR, one multilingual ASR, one ST, and two TTS benchmarks. Our experiments revealed various training tips and significant performance benefits obtained with Transformer for each task including the surprising superiority of Transformer in 13/15 ASR benchmarks in comparison with RNN. We are preparing to release Kaldi-style reproducible recipes using open source and publicly available datasets for all the ASR, ST, and TTS tasks for the community to succeed our exciting outcomes.