Delayed Fusion: Integrating Large Language Models into First-Pass Decoding in End-to-end Speech Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hori, Takaaki, Kocour, Martin, Haider, Adnan, McDermott, Erik, Zhuang, Xiaodan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hori, Takaaki
Kocour, Martin
Haider, Adnan
McDermott, Erik
Zhuang, Xiaodan
author_facet Hori, Takaaki
Kocour, Martin
Haider, Adnan
McDermott, Erik
Zhuang, Xiaodan
contents This paper presents an efficient decoding approach for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) with large language models (LLMs). Although shallow fusion is the most common approach to incorporate language models into E2E-ASR decoding, we face two practical problems with LLMs. (1) LLM inference is computationally costly. (2) There may be a vocabulary mismatch between the ASR model and the LLM. To resolve this mismatch, we need to retrain the ASR model and/or the LLM, which is at best time-consuming and in many cases not feasible. We propose "delayed fusion," which applies LLM scores to ASR hypotheses with a delay during decoding and enables easier use of pre-trained LLMs in ASR tasks. This method can reduce not only the number of hypotheses scored by the LLM but also the number of LLM inference calls. It also allows re-tokenizion of ASR hypotheses during decoding if ASR and LLM employ different tokenizations. We demonstrate that delayed fusion provides improved decoding speed and accuracy compared to shallow fusion and N-best rescoring using the LibriHeavy ASR corpus and three public LLMs, OpenLLaMA 3B & 7B and Mistral 7B.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Delayed Fusion: Integrating Large Language Models into First-Pass Decoding in End-to-end Speech Recognition
Hori, Takaaki
Kocour, Martin
Haider, Adnan
McDermott, Erik
Zhuang, Xiaodan
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
68T10
I.2.7; I.5.4
This paper presents an efficient decoding approach for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) with large language models (LLMs). Although shallow fusion is the most common approach to incorporate language models into E2E-ASR decoding, we face two practical problems with LLMs. (1) LLM inference is computationally costly. (2) There may be a vocabulary mismatch between the ASR model and the LLM. To resolve this mismatch, we need to retrain the ASR model and/or the LLM, which is at best time-consuming and in many cases not feasible. We propose "delayed fusion," which applies LLM scores to ASR hypotheses with a delay during decoding and enables easier use of pre-trained LLMs in ASR tasks. This method can reduce not only the number of hypotheses scored by the LLM but also the number of LLM inference calls. It also allows re-tokenizion of ASR hypotheses during decoding if ASR and LLM employ different tokenizations. We demonstrate that delayed fusion provides improved decoding speed and accuracy compared to shallow fusion and N-best rescoring using the LibriHeavy ASR corpus and three public LLMs, OpenLLaMA 3B & 7B and Mistral 7B.
title Delayed Fusion: Integrating Large Language Models into First-Pass Decoding in End-to-end Speech Recognition
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
68T10
I.2.7; I.5.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09258