Efficient Deep Speech Understanding at the Edge

Contemporary Speech Understanding (SU) involves a sophisticated pipeline: capturing real-time voice input, the pipeline encompasses a deep neural network with an encoder-decoder architecture enhanced by beam search. This network periodically assesses attention and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) scores in its autoregressive output. This paper aims to enhance SU performance on edge devices with limited resources. It pursues two intertwined goals: accelerating on-device execution and efficiently handling inputs that surpass the on-device model's capacity. While these objectives are well-established, we introduce innovative solutions that specifically address SU's distinctive challenges: 1. Late contextualization: Enables the parallel execution of a model's attentive encoder during input ingestion. 2. Pilot decoding: Alleviates temporal load imbalances. 3. Autoregression offramps: Facilitate offloading decisions based on partial output sequences. Our techniques seamlessly integrate with existing SU models, pipelines, and frameworks, allowing for independent or combined application. Together, they constitute a hybrid solution for edge SU, exemplified by our prototype, XYZ. Evaluated on platforms equipped with 6-8 Arm cores, our system achieves State-of-the-Art (SOTA) accuracy, reducing end-to-end latency by 2x and halving offloading requirements.