arXiv AI

Murmur: Efficient Long-Context ASR Inference with Hierarchical Chunking

The paper introduces Murmur, an inference system that uses hierarchical chunking to improve long-form automatic speech recognition (ASR). By decoding intermediate target chunks in parallel and employing a fast short-window ASR for speculative drafting, Murmur achieves a 2.5× reduction in end-to-end latency while also lowering tcpWER by 1.9 points on average across English and Mandarin meeting datasets.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR

X2Streaming-ASR introduces a method for streaming automatic speech recognition that separates the decision of when to commit a transcript from what to commit. The approach uses a three‑stage training process: first establishing streaming capability, then warm‑starting a commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refining the policy with character‑level, segment‑assigned group‑relative rewards for accuracy and latency. On AISHELL‑1/2/3 and WenetSpeech datasets, the system achieves mean character‑level commit latencies of 27–84 ms, far lower than baseline systems, while also attaining the best streaming character error rates on AISHELL‑1 and AISHELL‑3.

By Zhiwei Lin, Kaiqi Fu, Rime Wen, Zehan Liu, Shawn Qin, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Look Less, Hear Better: Jointly Rewarded GRPO for Streaming ASR

The paper introduces AWED, a word‑level emission‑delay metric, and demonstrates that post‑training a delayed‑streaming model with a joint reward (GRPO) improves both accuracy and latency. Using a single operating point (τ=6 frames), the method outperforms both its supervised baseline and the Voxtral Realtime backbone across all lookahead budgets, reducing WER by up to 30.8% at 80 ms delay and lowering median AWED from 1.17 s to 1.04 s.

By Xiuwen Zheng
arXiv AI
Jul 7

StarTSE: Towards Streaming Target Speaker Extraction via Chunk-wise Interleaved Splicing of Autoregressive Language Model

arXiv:2604. 19635v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While generative models have set new benchmarks for Target Speaker Extraction (TSE), their inherent reliance on global context precludes deployment in real-time applications.

By Shuhai Peng, Hui Lu, Jinjiang Liu, Liyang Chen, Guiping Zhong, Jiakui Li, Huimeng Wang, Haiyun Li, Liang Cao, Shiyin Kang, Zhiyong Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Whisfusion: Parallel ASR Decoding with Masked Diffusion

arXiv:2508. 07048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) encoder-decoder models dominate high-quality multilingual ASR, but their left-to-right decoders make inference latency scale with transcript length.

By Taeyoun Kwon, Junhyuk Ahn, Taegeun Yun, Heeju Jwa, Yoonchae Choi, Siwon Park, Jongchan Kim, Hyungon Ryu, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Omnilingual-MsASR: Benchmarking Multimodal, Multilingual, Long-Form Multi-Speaker ASR of Omni Large Language Models

Omnilingual-MsASR is a new benchmark designed to evaluate omni‑modal large language models on long‑form, multi‑speaker automatic speech recognition across six languages, with recordings up to 30 minutes and up to 20 speakers. The benchmark provides parallel audio and video inputs to test cross‑modal consistency and the models’ ability to use complementary cues from both modalities. Evaluations of leading omni‑modal LLMs show significant performance gaps, with many models achieving word error rates above 100%, underscoring challenges in temporal localization, speaker disambiguation, and cross‑modal synergy.

By Yuan Ge, Pei Zhang, Xize Cheng, Lingzhou Mu, Mingyang Wang, Jin Xu, Baosong Yang, Shengxiang Gao, Jingbo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

TontaubeV1: Streaming Text-to-Speech with Hierarchical Codec Modeling and Bounded Context

TontaubeV1 is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that preserves natural prosody while running on a single consumer GPU. It encodes speech with a hierarchical DualCodec representation at 12.5 Hz, separating a semantic stream from successive acoustic refinements, and uses Qwen3‑derived transformers to predict the semantic stream, utterance duration, and acoustic refinements. The system supports up to one minute of reference audio for voice conditioning, streams with a 200 ms latency to first audio, and achieves real‑time factors of 0.08 (single input) and 0.02 (eight concurrent inputs).

By Fritz Cremer, Jonathan Cremer
arXiv AI
2d ago

Confucius4-R2T2: A Stable-Prefix Streaming ASR Model for Real Real-Time Transcription

Confucius4‑R2T2, a stable‑prefix streaming ASR model, is introduced to ensure that once a token is emitted it is never revised, thereby reducing wasted work and incorrect actions in real‑time transcription. The model is derived by post‑training Qwen3‑ASR‑1.7B on 1,500 hours of Chinese and English audio while keeping its audio encoder frozen, and it leverages a new concept called Longest Stable Prefix (LSP) to convert a full‑context model into a stable‑prefix streaming one without architectural changes. Evaluation shows that R2T2 achieves near full‑context quality with low latency and stable output, and its benefits generalize beyond the languages used in training.

By Daniel Huang, Qi He, Shaoxiong Duan, Yingjie Li, Qiao Cheng, Yitao Duan