I-Parakeet: מימוש Conformer ASR באינטג'רים בלבד על NPU נייד

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.30846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose I-Parakeet, an integer-only implementation of NVIDIA's Parakeet-CTC (0.6B parameters) that runs on a smartphone NPU without any floating-point operator or CPU fallback. Modern Conformer ASR models are hard to deploy on edge devices because of their size, and quantized models still fall back to floating point for numerically sensitive operations. This prevents them from fully exploiting integer accelerators such as mobile NPUs. To achieve this, our contributions are threefold. First, we derive an integer formulation of the relative-positional self-attention at the core of the Conformer. We fuse its two score branches with different quantization scales and the relative shift into integer-only operations. Second, we int