mega-asr-onnx

Mega-ASR — INT4 ONNX (GPTQ-calibrated)

INT4 ONNX export of zhifeixie/Mega-ASR, a 1.7B-parameter multilingual ASR foundation model built on Qwen3-ASR-1.7B with 2.6M training samples covering noise, far-field speech, obstruction, recording artifacts, echo, dropout, and transmission dropout.

The model is split into three ONNX files (Whisper-style: audio encoder + LLM decoder prefill + LLM decoder step) so it can be loaded directly in the browser via onnxruntime-web or as a CPU/GPU service via onnxruntime. INT4 weight quantization (MatMulNBits, 4-bit block-32 asymmetric) compresses the model from ~7.5 GB fp16 down to ~2 GB total — small enough for a one-time browser cache.

Both decoder halves are GPTQ-calibrated on 168 / 63 English Voices-in-the-Wild samples (prefill / step respectively). The step model uses past-KV-cache-aware calibration: prefill output is piped into step, so the calibration captures the realistic activation distribution of autoregressive decode.

What's in this repo

Compression vs original

The decoder is ~95% MatMul ops so MatMulNBits 4-bit quantization works well. The audio encoder is mostly Conv2d / Linear in transformer layers — MatMulNBits quantizes the transformer Linear ops (most of the weight) but leaves the small Conv2d front-end at fp16.

Quality

Benchmarked on the 8 Voices-in-the-Wild-Bench example clips (real-world noisy conditions, all English), word-level agreement (1 − WER), prompt forced to language English:

The recommended config (INT8 audio encoder + GPTQ-INT4 LLM decoder) is the size/quality sweet spot for browser deployment. Forcing the language (rather than auto-detecting) recovers most of the quantization drift.

GPTQ calibration on both prefill and step yields +0.8% over plain RTN at the same model size, most visibly on the echo sample where the RTN-quantized decoder previously hallucinated "the size was fine standing up at the terrible white wall" — the GPTQ-quantized decoder produces "the size feels fine standing up against terrible white walls", recovering the leading clause exactly.

Note: fp16 ONNX actually beats PT bf16 (96.7 vs 95.1) because forcing language skips the model's audio-quality-router language detection, which is where the PT model loses points on echo and recording (truncated).

Inference (Python)

pip install onnxruntime numpy soundfile transformers qwen-asr
git clone https://huggingface.co/Reza2kn/mega-asr-onnx
cd mega-asr-onnx
python inference.py --audio examples/noise.wav

Inference (browser)

A live browser demo (loads these ONNX models directly via onnxruntime-web and WebGPU) is at Reza2kn/mega-asr-bench. The first visit downloads ~2 GB of model weights, cached by the browser for subsequent runs.

Performance

Conversion details

• Exported via torch.onnx.export(..., dynamo=True) from PyTorch 2.12.
• Audio encoder rewrites: replaced packed-sequence flash-attention with standard batched attention + chunked Conv2d (parity cos ≈ 0.998 vs original).
• Decoder uses a single DecoderForExport wrapper that accepts a flat tuple of KV cache tensors; prefill and step are two specialisations of the same Python wrapper exported separately.
• Quantization: onnxruntime.quantization.matmul_nbits_quantizer.MatMulNBitsQuantizer with block_size=32, is_symmetric=False, bits=4, algo=GPTQ. Non-MatMul ops (LayerNorm, RMSNorm, residuals, RoPE, the audio-encoder Conv2d front-end) stay at fp16.
• KV cache: dynamic past-length axis (Dim("T_past")) via dynamo's dynamic_shapes API.

GPTQ calibration

The default ORT GPTQ implementation in onnxruntime.quantization.neural_compressor.weight_only is CPU-only (numpy matmul + np.linalg.cholesky for the Hessian inverse), and runs at ~90 min for a 1.7B model on a workstation CPU. For this release we ported the GPTQ inner loop + Hessian accumulation to torch.cuda and added a diagonal-jitter retry on the Cholesky factorisation (fp32 is stricter than LAPACK on barely-singular Hessians). On an RTX 5080 Laptop the prefill GPTQ runs at ~99% GPU util and finishes in ~35 min; the step GPTQ takes ~3 min (fewer unique MatMul input names because of GQA sharing).

• Prefill calibration: 168 samples (24 per noise/far_field/obstructed/ distortion/recording/echo/dropout split), English-only filter on the text field, audio decoded via soundfile (Audio(decode=False)) to avoid the torchcodec import on streaming cast_column.
• Step calibration: 63 samples from the same English-only set; each sample's calibration feed is built by running the fp16 prefill ONNX, capturing all 56 present.{0..27}.{key,value} tensors, embedding the greedy first predicted token, and pairing it with attention_mask of length L + 1 and position_ids = L. This gives the step's GPTQ Hessian exactly the autoregressive-decode activation distribution it sees at inference.

Credits

• Original model: zhifeixie/Mega-ASR (1.7B params, Apache-2.0)
• ONNX export + GPTQ quantization: this repo
• Benchmark: Voices-in-the-Wild-Bench
• Live demo: Reza2kn/mega-asr-bench

Licensing and attribution

This model distribution is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE. Existing third-party copyright, license, and attribution notices remain applicable.

• Upstream: Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B; declared license: apache-2.0.

• Upstream: zhifeixie/Mega-ASR; declared license: apache-2.0.