Design of the IBM Granite 5.0 TurboCTC ASR Model
IBM details Granite 5.0 TurboCTC, a 470M-parameter Conformer-based English ASR model on the Open ASR speed-accuracy Pareto frontier, released on Hugging Face.
IBM describes Granite 5.0 Turbo CTC, a 470 million parameter encoder-only ASR model built on Conformer blocks with pyramidal temporal subsampling, strided depthwise convolutions, chunk-wise self-attention, and conditioning on middle-layer predictions. Training uses only publicly available data, a novel Muon optimizer, and balanced data sampling. Inference optimizations make it twice as fast as the fastest competitor while sitting on the Open ASR leaderboard Pareto frontier for English short-form ASR. Weights are released on Hugging Face under a permissive license.
- 470M-parameter encoder-only Conformer model with strided depthwise convolutions and chunk-wise self-attention
- Trained only on publicly available data using a novel Muon optimizer and balanced sampling
- Twice as fast as the fastest competitor on the Open ASR leaderboard Pareto frontier
- Released on Hugging Face (ibm-granite/granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc) under a permissive license
Full article135 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
We describe the architecture, training methodology and inference speedups of Granite 5.0 Turbo CTC, a 470 million parameter encoder-only model with an excellent speed-accuracy tradeoff. The architecture uses pyramidal temporal subsampling within Conformer blocks using strided depthwise convolutions, block-diagonal (chunk-wise) self-attention, and conditioning on intermediate predictions from the middle layer. Training highlights are the use of only publicly available data, the novel use of a Muon optimizer, and balanced data sampling. Inference speedups include replacing 1 x 1 convolutions with linear layers and optimizing the attention computation in the Conformer blocks. Collectively, these result in a model that is on the speed-accuracy Pareto frontier of the Open ASR leaderboard for English short-form ASR while being twice as fast as the fastest competitor. The model can be used under a permissive license and downloaded from https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20104