Hypformer: A Fast Hypothesis-Driven Rescoring Speech Recognition Framework

Recently, the performance of non-autoregressive ASR models has made significant progress but still lags behind hybrid CTC/attention systems. This paper introduces Hypformer, a fast hypothesis-driven rescoring speech recognition framework. Multiple hypothetical prefixes are realized by fast prefix generation algorithm. With two different rescoring methods, nar-ar rescoring and nar$^{2}$ rescoring, Hypformer can flexibly switch between autoregressive and non-autoregressive decoding modes to perform rescoring of hypothesis prefixes. Experiments on the standard Mandarin datasets AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-2 demonstrate that Hypformer outperforms the state-of-the-art Hybrid CTC/Attention systems in ASR performance while achieving a speedup of over six times. Experiments on the Mandarin sub-dialect dataset KeSpeech indicate that Hypformer achieves more accurate recognition by leveraging richer contextual information.