Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-Thai-Engram

Qwen3-ASR-0.6B + Thai N-gram Engram

A token-level bigram/trigram memory (Engram) injected into a frozen Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B, trained for Thai speech recognition. On a fixed 300-clip held-out set it reduced corpus character error rate from 17.8051 % to 9.0448 %.

This repository holds a delta, not a full model. The base Qwen3-ASR-0.6B weights are not duplicated here — they are fetched from the Hub. The only trained parameters are the 8,249,344 Engram parameters in engram_step_000750.pt (32 MiB).

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What the Engram is

A hash-based N-gram lookup memory, not an adapter or a LoRA. It reads the token IDs of the decoder input, hashes every bigram and trigram through 16 independent heads into 10,000 / 2,000 buckets, and turns the retrieved vectors into a residual:

hidden = decoder_layer_2_output + Engram(hidden, input_ids)

It is injected after the FFN residual of decoder layer 2 only. During inference the residual is applied to the last prompt position and every generated position; the earlier prompt positions are masked out.

key_proj, value_proj, and short_conv are initialised to zero, so at step 0 the Engram contributes exactly nothing and the model is bit-identical to the baseline. All 785 M base parameters stay frozen — only the Engram trains.

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Results

300 fixed Thai clips from source offset 250,000 of CMKL/Porjai-Thai-voice-dataset-central, filtered to 1–8 seconds. Greedy decoding, max_new_tokens=192, use_cache=False. One AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (gfx1201), ROCm/HIP 7.1.52802-9999, PyTorch 2.9.1, bitsandbytes 0.50.2.

F1 is pooled character-level micro-F1 after Thai normalization and whitespace removal — not word-level F1, and not accuracy.

The Engram checkpoints were evaluated at steps 300, 500, 750, and 1000; 750 was best on this slice and is the one published here. Only step 750 is released.

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Usage

pip install torch transformers qwen-asr huggingface_hub

import soundfile as sf
from engram_loader import load_engram_model, transcribe

model, processor, runtime = load_engram_model()   # downloads base + this delta
audio, sr = sf.read("clip.wav")                   # 16 kHz mono, float32

print(transcribe(model, processor, audio, runtime, use_engram=True))   # Engram
print(transcribe(model, processor, audio, runtime, use_engram=False))  # baseline

hf/engram_loader.py is a self-contained port of the injection code — copy it next to your script. Toggle runtime["enabled"] = False to get the frozen baseline from the same loaded model; that is exactly how the "Baseline" rows above were produced, so the comparison costs one flag and no extra weights.

import torch
from engram_loader import load_engram_model, transcribe

# The Engram is fp32; the base model runs in BF16. Keep that split.
model, processor, runtime = load_engram_model(device="cuda", dtype=torch.bfloat16)

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Training

The training loop is not released — the checkpoint is an input to the evaluation package, not an output of it.

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Limitations

• One sample, one offset. Every number is from a single fixed 300-clip slice at source offset 250,000. No confidence intervals were computed. This is not the full corpus.
• One machine. All timings are from one RX 9070 XT on ROCm. Fewer bits did not mean faster inference here: NF4 and LLM.int8 were both slower per clip than BF16.
• Quantization hurts. NF4 left the Engram 3.1128 CER points above the BF16 baseline. That is a difference in CER, not a 3 % loss of accuracy.
• The quantizers are not comparable to each other. NF4 applies to Linear and Embedding modules; LLM.int8 applies to Linear only, leaving embeddings in BF16.
• Bigram/trigram only. Nothing longer than a trigram is memorized, and the memory is keyed on token IDs, so a tokenizer change invalidates the tables.
• Thai only. Trained exclusively on Thai speech; no other language was evaluated.

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Licensing — read this

The Engram checkpoints were trained on CMKL/Porjai-Thai-voice-dataset-central, which is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. These weights are therefore released under CC BY-SA 4.0 as well, and you must credit the corpus if you redistribute them.

engram_loader.py is MIT licensed, separate from the weights.

The base Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B is Apache-2.0 and is not redistributed here — obtain it from its own repository under its own terms. The Porjai corpus is not redistributed either.

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Citation

@misc{nammungkun2026engramqwenasr,
  title        = {Adding a Thai N-gram Engram to Qwen3-ASR-0.6B:
                  quality, memory, and latency of BF16, NF4, and LLM.int8
                  inference on ROCm},
  author       = {Nammungkun, Thanabodee},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/Thanabordee/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-Thai-Engram}},
  note         = {ORCID 0009-0004-9410-9839}
}

A companion Zenodo record carries the full evaluation package (library, one script per reported result, every per-sample prediction, table, and figure) and the technical report in English and Thai.

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ภาษาไทย

Engram แบบ N-gram ภาษาไทยบน Qwen3-ASR-0.6B — หน่วยความจำระดับโทเคน (bigram/trigram) ต่อเข้ากับ decoder layer 2 ของ Qwen3-ASR-0.6B ที่แช่แข็ง weights ไว้ทั้งหมด เทรนเฉพาะ Engram 8,249,344 พารามิเตอร์

repo นี้เก็บ delta เท่านั้น ไม่ได้ก็อป weights ของ base model มาไว้ — โหลด base จาก Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B แยก

บนชุดทดสอบคงที่ 300 คลิป CER ลดจาก 17.8051 % เหลือ 9.0448 % (character F1 86.3235 % → 92.9302 %) และเปิด/ปิด Engram ได้ด้วย flag เดียวบนโมเดลที่โหลดแล้ว

ข้อจำกัด: ตัวเลขทั้งหมดมาจากคลิปชุดเดียว 300 คลิป ที่ offset 250,000 ของ corpus ไม่ได้คำนวณ confidence interval และวัดบน RX 9070 XT + ROCm เครื่องเดียว

สัญญาอนุญาต: weights เทรนจากข้อมูล CC BY-SA 4.0 จึงปล่อยเป็น CC BY-SA 4.0 ส่วน engram_loader.py เป็น MIT