English

Multi-Head State Space Model for Speech Recognition

Audio and Speech Processing 2023-05-29 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

State space models (SSMs) have recently shown promising results on small-scale sequence and language modelling tasks, rivalling and outperforming many attention-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a multi-head state space (MH-SSM) architecture equipped with special gating mechanisms, where parallel heads are taught to learn local and global temporal dynamics on sequence data. As a drop-in replacement for multi-head attention in transformer encoders, this new model significantly outperforms the transformer transducer on the LibriSpeech speech recognition corpus. Furthermore, we augment the transformer block with MH-SSMs layers, referred to as the Stateformer, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the LibriSpeech task, with word error rates of 1.76\%/4.37\% on the development and 1.91\%/4.36\% on the test sets without using an external language model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.12498,
  title  = {Multi-Head State Space Model for Speech Recognition},
  author = {Yassir Fathullah and Chunyang Wu and Yuan Shangguan and Junteng Jia and Wenhan Xiong and Jay Mahadeokar and Chunxi Liu and Yangyang Shi and Ozlem Kalinli and Mike Seltzer and Mark J. F. Gales},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.12498},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Interspeech 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:40:34.256Z