English

Multi-Convformer: Extending Conformer with Multiple Convolution Kernels

Computation and Language 2024-07-25 v2 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Sound Audio and Speech Processing

Abstract

Convolutions have become essential in state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition~(ASR) systems due to their efficient modelling of local context. Notably, its use in Conformers has led to superior performance compared to vanilla Transformer-based ASR systems. While components other than the convolution module in the Conformer have been reexamined, altering the convolution module itself has been far less explored. Towards this, we introduce Multi-Convformer that uses multiple convolution kernels within the convolution module of the Conformer in conjunction with gating. This helps in improved modeling of local dependencies at varying granularities. Our model rivals existing Conformer variants such as CgMLP and E-Branchformer in performance, while being more parameter efficient. We empirically compare our approach with Conformer and its variants across four different datasets and three different modelling paradigms and show up to 8% relative word error rate~(WER) improvements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.03718,
  title  = {Multi-Convformer: Extending Conformer with Multiple Convolution Kernels},
  author = {Darshan Prabhu and Yifan Peng and Preethi Jyothi and Shinji Watanabe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.03718},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted to INTERSPEECH 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:28:54.078Z