arXiv Computation and Language By Taichi Nishimura

I-Parakeet: Integer-Only Conformer ASR on Mobile NPU

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I-Parakeet is an integer‑only implementation of NVIDIA’s Parakeet‑CTC Conformer ASR model that runs entirely on a smartphone NPU without any floating‑point operations or CPU fallback. The paper introduces three key techniques: an integer formulation of relative‑positional self‑attention, a minimax‑optimized Swish approximation, and layer‑wise range analysis with INT16 BatchNorm and percentile calibration for pre‑encoder activations. The resulting model achieves 4.97% WER on LibriSpeech test‑other and runs 7.5× faster than a CPU baseline on a Qualcomm NPU.

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