Spiralformer: Low Latency Encoder for Streaming Speech Recognition with Circular Layer Skipping and Early Exiting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tsunoo, Emiru, Futami, Hayato, Kashiwagi, Yosuke, Arora, Siddhant, Watanabe, Shinji
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tsunoo, Emiru
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Arora, Siddhant
Watanabe, Shinji
author_facet Tsunoo, Emiru
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Arora, Siddhant
Watanabe, Shinji
contents For streaming speech recognition, a Transformer-based encoder has been widely used with block processing. Although many studies addressed improving emission latency of transducers, little work has been explored for improving encoding latency of the block processing. We seek to reduce latency by frequently emitting a chunk with a small shift rather than scarce large-chunk emissions, resulting in higher computational costs. To efficiently compute with the small chunk shift, we propose a new encoder, Spiralformer, tailored for block processing by combining layer dropping and early exiting. We skip layer computation in a cyclic manner and shift the computed layer in each block spirally, which completes computation for all the layers over the block processing. Experimentally, we observed that our method achieved 21.6% reduction in the averaged token emission delay in Librispeech, and 7.0% in CSJ, compared with the baseline with similar computational cost and word error rates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spiralformer: Low Latency Encoder for Streaming Speech Recognition with Circular Layer Skipping and Early Exiting
Tsunoo, Emiru
Futami, Hayato
Kashiwagi, Yosuke
Arora, Siddhant
Watanabe, Shinji
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
For streaming speech recognition, a Transformer-based encoder has been widely used with block processing. Although many studies addressed improving emission latency of transducers, little work has been explored for improving encoding latency of the block processing. We seek to reduce latency by frequently emitting a chunk with a small shift rather than scarce large-chunk emissions, resulting in higher computational costs. To efficiently compute with the small chunk shift, we propose a new encoder, Spiralformer, tailored for block processing by combining layer dropping and early exiting. We skip layer computation in a cyclic manner and shift the computed layer in each block spirally, which completes computation for all the layers over the block processing. Experimentally, we observed that our method achieved 21.6% reduction in the averaged token emission delay in Librispeech, and 7.0% in CSJ, compared with the baseline with similar computational cost and word error rates.
title Spiralformer: Low Latency Encoder for Streaming Speech Recognition with Circular Layer Skipping and Early Exiting
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00982