diff --git a/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless2/beam_search.py b/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless2/beam_search.py
index ce8b04afd..b89cd7638 100644
--- a/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless2/beam_search.py
+++ b/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless2/beam_search.py
@@ -279,7 +279,7 @@ def greedy_search(
     device = next(model.parameters()).device
 
     decoder_input = torch.tensor(
-        [blank_id] * context_size, device=device, dtype=torch.int64
+        [-1] * (context_size - 1) + [blank_id], device=device, dtype=torch.int64
     ).reshape(1, context_size)
 
     decoder_out = model.decoder(decoder_input, need_pad=False)
@@ -373,7 +373,7 @@ def greedy_search_batch(
     assert torch.all(encoder_out_lens > 0), encoder_out_lens
     assert N == batch_size_list[0], (N, batch_size_list)
 
-    hyps = [[blank_id] * context_size for _ in range(N)]
+    hyps = [[-1] * (context_size - 1) + [blank_id] for _ in range(N)]
 
     decoder_input = torch.tensor(
         hyps,
diff --git a/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7/decoder.py b/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7/decoder.py
index a1c755d73..3875ab9d6 100644
--- a/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7/decoder.py
+++ b/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7/decoder.py
@@ -85,7 +85,9 @@ class Decoder(nn.Module):
           Return a tensor of shape (N, U, decoder_dim).
         """
         y = y.to(torch.int64)
-        embedding_out = self.embedding(y)
+        # this stuff about clamp() is a temporary fix for a mismatch
+        # at utterance start, we use negative ids in beam_search.py
+        embedding_out = self.embedding(y.clamp(min=0)) * (y >= 0).unsqueeze(-1)
         if self.context_size > 1:
             embedding_out = embedding_out.permute(0, 2, 1)
             if need_pad is True: