X2Streaming-ASR: wait when uncertain, emit when ready for streaming ASR
TL;DR
X2Streaming-ASR is proposed, which decomposes streaming recognition into when to commit and what to commit, and achieves the best streaming CER among the evaluated systems on AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-3 with substantially lower latency.
Abstract
Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) for real-time voice agents and full-duplex dialogue must provide accurate partial transcripts with low commit latency. Existing systems commonly use a fixed chunk size, look-ahead, or target delay, or encourage emissions near estimated acoustic boundaries. These approaches do not directly optimize how much additional context to use at each output position under a single-pass, hard-commit constraint. We propose X2Streaming-ASR, which decomposes streaming recognition into when to commit and what to commit. Its three-stage training procedure first establishes streaming recognition ability, then warm-starts the commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refines the policy using character-level, segment-assigned group-relative rewards for recognition accuracy and latency. Across ten Chinese and English test sets, X2Streaming-ASR attains the lowest mean commit latency relative to forced-aligned endpoints, 32--109ms on Chinese characters and 12--85ms on English words, while recognition accuracy remains comparable to existing systems.Code is available at https://github.com/X-Square-Robot/X2Streaming-ASR.
