Factorized Delayed Streams Modeling for LLM-based Streaming ASR

Abstract

Delayed Streams Modeling (DSM) enables LLM-based streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) by aligning acoustic and text streams on a common timeline. DSM adds the padding token <p> and the word-start token <w> to the LLM vocabulary and predicts them together with normal text tokens using the same softmax. We first show that <w> can be removed while maintaining competitive recognition performance. Based on this result, we propose Factorized DSM (F-DSM), which separates the waiting probability for <p> from the distribution over the original LLM vocabulary. This factorization removes ASR-specific tokens from the text prediction space and allows the large-vocabulary softmax to be skipped on waiting steps. Experiments on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese and LibriSpeech show that F-DSM achieves better recognition performance than DSM. It also greatly reduces GPU memory use while maintaining similar training throughput, provides a small inference speed improvement through softmax skipping, and reduces the degradation in text-only perplexity observed with DSM.