ZeroPrompt: Streaming Acoustic Encoders are Zero-Shot Masked LMs
Xingchen Song Di Wu Binbin Zhang Zhendong Peng Bo Dang Fuping Pan Zhiyong Wu
In this paper, we present ZeroPrompt (Figure 1-(a)) and the corresponding
Prompt-and-Refine strategy (Figure 3), two simple but effective
\textbf{training-free} methods to decrease the Token Display Time (TDT) of
streaming ASR models \textbf{without any accuracy loss}. The core idea of
ZeroPrompt is to append zeroed content to each chunk during inference, which
acts like a prompt to encourage the model to predict future tokens even before
they were spoken. We argue that streaming acoustic encoders naturally have the
modeling ability of Masked Language Models and our experiments demonstrate that
ZeroPrompt is engineering cheap and can be applied to streaming acoustic
encoders on any dataset without any accuracy loss. Specifically, compared with
our baseline models, we achieve 350 $\sim$ 700ms reduction on First Token
Display Time (TDT-F) and 100 $\sim$ 400ms reduction on Last Token Display Time
(TDT-L), with theoretically and experimentally equal WER on both Aishell-1 and
Librispeech datasets.