icefall/docs/source/recipes/Streaming-ASR/librispeech/zipformer_transducer.rst

Zipformer Transducer
====================

This tutorial shows you how to run a **streaming** zipformer transducer model
with the `LibriSpeech <https://www.openslr.org/12>`_ dataset.

.. Note::

   The tutorial is suitable for `pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming <https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall/tree/master/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming>`_,

.. HINT::

  We assume you have read the page :ref:`install icefall` and have setup
  the environment for ``icefall``.

.. HINT::

  We recommend you to use a GPU or several GPUs to run this recipe.

.. hint::

   Please scroll down to the bottom of this page to find download links
   for pretrained models if you don't want to train a model from scratch.


We use pruned RNN-T to compute the loss.

.. note::

   You can find the paper about pruned RNN-T at the following address:

   `<https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13236>`_

The transducer model consists of 3 parts:

  - Encoder, a.k.a, the transcription network. We use a Zipformer model (proposed by Daniel Povey)
  - Decoder, a.k.a, the prediction network. We use a stateless model consisting of
    ``nn.Embedding`` and ``nn.Conv1d``
  - Joiner, a.k.a, the joint network.

.. caution::

   Contrary to the conventional RNN-T models, we use a stateless decoder.
   That is, it has no recurrent connections.


Data preparation
----------------

.. hint::

   The data preparation is the same as other recipes on LibriSpeech dataset,
   if you have finished this step, you can skip to ``Training`` directly.

.. code-block:: bash

  $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
  $ ./prepare.sh

The script ``./prepare.sh`` handles the data preparation for you, **automagically**.
All you need to do is to run it.

The data preparation contains several stages, you can use the following two
options:

  - ``--stage``
  - ``--stop-stage``

to control which stage(s) should be run. By default, all stages are executed.


For example,

.. code-block:: bash

  $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
  $ ./prepare.sh --stage 0 --stop-stage 0

means to run only stage 0.

To run stage 2 to stage 5, use:

.. code-block:: bash

  $ ./prepare.sh --stage 2 --stop-stage 5

.. HINT::

  If you have pre-downloaded the `LibriSpeech <https://www.openslr.org/12>`_
  dataset and the `musan <http://www.openslr.org/17/>`_ dataset, say,
  they are saved in ``/tmp/LibriSpeech`` and ``/tmp/musan``, you can modify
  the ``dl_dir`` variable in ``./prepare.sh`` to point to ``/tmp`` so that
  ``./prepare.sh`` won't re-download them.

.. NOTE::

  All generated files by ``./prepare.sh``, e.g., features, lexicon, etc,
  are saved in ``./data`` directory.

We provide the following YouTube video showing how to run ``./prepare.sh``.

.. note::

   To get the latest news of `next-gen Kaldi <https://github.com/k2-fsa>`_, please subscribe
   the following YouTube channel by `Nadira Povey <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_VaumpkmINz1pNkFXAN9mw>`_:

      `<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_VaumpkmINz1pNkFXAN9mw>`_

..  youtube:: ofEIoJL-mGM


Training
--------

Configurable options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. code-block:: bash

  $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
  $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --help


shows you the training options that can be passed from the commandline.
The following options are used quite often:

  - ``--exp-dir``

    The directory to save checkpoints, training logs and tensorboard.

  - ``--full-libri``

    If it's True, the training part uses all the training data, i.e.,
    960 hours. Otherwise, the training part uses only the subset
    ``train-clean-100``, which has 100 hours of training data.

    .. CAUTION::
      The training set is perturbed by speed with two factors: 0.9 and 1.1.
      If ``--full-libri`` is True, each epoch actually processes
      ``3x960 == 2880`` hours of data.

  - ``--num-epochs``

    It is the number of epochs to train. For instance,
    ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --num-epochs 30`` trains for 30 epochs
    and generates ``epoch-1.pt``, ``epoch-2.pt``, ..., ``epoch-30.pt``
    in the folder ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp``.

  - ``--start-epoch``

    It's used to resume training.
    ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --start-epoch 10`` loads the
    checkpoint ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/epoch-9.pt`` and starts
    training from epoch 10, based on the state from epoch 9.

  - ``--world-size``

    It is used for multi-GPU single-machine DDP training.

      - (a) If it is 1, then no DDP training is used.

      - (b) If it is 2, then GPU 0 and GPU 1 are used for DDP training.

    The following shows some use cases with it.

      **Use case 1**: You have 4 GPUs, but you only want to use GPU 0 and
      GPU 2 for training. You can do the following:

        .. code-block:: bash

          $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
          $ export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="0,2"
          $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --world-size 2

      **Use case 2**: You have 4 GPUs and you want to use all of them
      for training. You can do the following:

        .. code-block:: bash

          $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
          $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --world-size 4

      **Use case 3**: You have 4 GPUs but you only want to use GPU 3
      for training. You can do the following:

        .. code-block:: bash

          $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
          $ export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="3"
          $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --world-size 1

    .. caution::

      Only multi-GPU single-machine DDP training is implemented at present.
      Multi-GPU multi-machine DDP training will be added later.

  - ``--max-duration``

    It specifies the number of seconds over all utterances in a
    batch, before **padding**.
    If you encounter CUDA OOM, please reduce it.

    .. HINT::

      Due to padding, the number of seconds of all utterances in a
      batch will usually be larger than ``--max-duration``.

      A larger value for ``--max-duration`` may cause OOM during training,
      while a smaller value may increase the training time. You have to
      tune it.

  - ``--use-fp16``

    If it is True, the model will train with half precision, from our experiment
    results, by using half precision you can train with two times larger ``--max-duration``
    so as to get almost 2X speed up.

    We recommend using ``--use-fp16 True``.

  - ``--short-chunk-size``

    When training a streaming attention model with chunk masking, the chunk size
    would be either max sequence length of current batch or uniformly sampled from
    (1, short_chunk_size). The default value is 50, you don't have to change it most of the time.

  - ``--num-left-chunks``

    It indicates how many left context (in chunks) that can be seen when calculating attention.
    The default value is 4, you don't have to change it most of the time.


  - ``--decode-chunk-len``

    The chunk size for decoding (in frames before subsampling). It is used for validation.
    The default value is 32 (i.e., 320ms).


Pre-configured options
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are some training options, e.g., number of encoder layers,
encoder dimension, decoder dimension, number of warmup steps etc,
that are not passed from the commandline.
They are pre-configured by the function ``get_params()`` in
`pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py <https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall/blob/master/egs/librispeech/ASR/pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py>`_

You don't need to change these pre-configured parameters. If you really need to change
them, please modify ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py`` directly.


Training logs
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Training logs and checkpoints are saved in ``--exp-dir`` (e.g. ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp``.
You will find the following files in that directory:

  - ``epoch-1.pt``, ``epoch-2.pt``, ...

    These are checkpoint files saved at the end of each epoch, containing model
    ``state_dict`` and optimizer ``state_dict``.
    To resume training from some checkpoint, say ``epoch-10.pt``, you can use:

      .. code-block:: bash

        $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --start-epoch 11

  - ``checkpoint-436000.pt``, ``checkpoint-438000.pt``, ...

    These are checkpoint files saved every ``--save-every-n`` batches,
    containing model ``state_dict`` and optimizer ``state_dict``.
    To resume training from some checkpoint, say ``checkpoint-436000``, you can use:

      .. code-block:: bash

        $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py --start-batch 436000

  - ``tensorboard/``

    This folder contains tensorBoard logs. Training loss, validation loss, learning
    rate, etc, are recorded in these logs. You can visualize them by:

      .. code-block:: bash

        $ cd pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/tensorboard
        $ tensorboard dev upload --logdir . --description "pruned transducer training for LibriSpeech with icefall"

  .. hint::

    If you don't have access to google, you can use the following command
    to view the tensorboard log locally:

      .. code-block:: bash

        cd pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/tensorboard
        tensorboard --logdir . --port 6008

    It will print the following message:

      .. code-block::

        Serving TensorBoard on localhost; to expose to the network, use a proxy or pass --bind_all
        TensorBoard 2.8.0 at http://localhost:6008/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

    Now start your browser and go to `<http://localhost:6008>`_ to view the tensorboard
    logs.


  - ``log/log-train-xxxx``

    It is the detailed training log in text format, same as the one
    you saw printed to the console during training.

Usage example
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You can use the following command to start the training using 4 GPUs:

.. code-block:: bash

  export CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES="0,1,2,3"
  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py \
    --world-size 4 \
    --num-epochs 30 \
    --start-epoch 1 \
    --use-fp16 1 \
    --exp-dir pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
    --full-libri 1 \
    --max-duration 550

Decoding
--------

The decoding part uses checkpoints saved by the training part, so you have
to run the training part first.

.. hint::

   There are two kinds of checkpoints:

    - (1) ``epoch-1.pt``, ``epoch-2.pt``, ..., which are saved at the end
      of each epoch. You can pass ``--epoch`` to
      ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py`` to use them.

    - (2) ``checkpoints-436000.pt``, ``epoch-438000.pt``, ..., which are saved
      every ``--save-every-n`` batches. You can pass ``--iter`` to
      ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py`` to use them.

    We suggest that you try both types of checkpoints and choose the one
    that produces the lowest WERs.

.. tip::

    To decode a streaming model, you can use either ``simulate streaming decoding`` in ``decode.py`` or
    ``real chunk-wise streaming decoding`` in ``streaming_decode.py``. The difference between ``decode.py`` and
    ``streaming_decode.py`` is that, ``decode.py`` processes the whole acoustic frames at one time with masking (i.e. same as training),
    but ``streaming_decode.py`` processes the acoustic frames chunk by chunk.

.. NOTE::

   ``simulate streaming decoding`` in ``decode.py`` and ``real chunk-size streaming decoding`` in ``streaming_decode.py`` should
   produce almost the same results given the same ``--decode-chunk-len``.


Simulate streaming decoding
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. code-block:: bash

  $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
  $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py --help

shows the options for decoding.
The following options are important for streaming models:

  ``--decode-chunk-len``

    It is same as in ``train.py``, which specifies the chunk size for decoding (in frames before subsampling).
    The default value is 32 (i.e., 320ms).


The following shows two examples (for the two types of checkpoints):

.. code-block:: bash

  for m in greedy_search fast_beam_search modified_beam_search; do
    for epoch in 30; do
      for avg in 12 11 10 9 8; do
        ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py \
          --epoch $epoch \
          --avg $avg \
          --decode-chunk-len 32 \
          --exp-dir pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
          --max-duration 600 \
          --decoding-method $m
      done
    done
  done


.. code-block:: bash

  for m in greedy_search fast_beam_search modified_beam_search; do
    for iter in 474000; do
      for avg in 8 10 12 14 16 18; do
        ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py \
          --iter $iter \
          --avg $avg \
          --decode-chunk-len 32 \
          --exp-dir pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
          --max-duration 600 \
          --decoding-method $m
      done
    done
  done


Real streaming decoding
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. code-block:: bash

  $ cd egs/librispeech/ASR
  $ ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/streaming_decode.py --help

shows the options for decoding.
The following options are important for streaming models:

  ``--decode-chunk-len``

    It is same as in ``train.py``, which specifies the chunk size for decoding (in frames before subsampling).
    The default value is 32 (i.e., 320ms).
    For ``real streaming decoding``, we will process ``decode-chunk-len`` acoustic frames at each time.

  ``--num-decode-streams``

    The number of decoding streams that can be run in parallel (very similar to the ``bath size``).
    For ``real streaming decoding``, the batches will be packed dynamically, for example, if the
    ``num-decode-streams`` equals to 10, then, sequence 1 to 10 will be decoded at first, after a while,
    suppose sequence 1 and 2 are done, so, sequence 3 to 12 will be processed parallelly in a batch.


The following shows two examples (for the two types of checkpoints):

.. code-block:: bash

  for m in greedy_search fast_beam_search modified_beam_search; do
    for epoch in 30; do
      for avg in 12 11 10 9 8; do
        ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py \
          --epoch $epoch \
          --avg $avg \
          --decode-chunk-len 32 \
          --num-decode-streams 100 \
          --exp-dir pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
          --decoding-method $m
      done
    done
  done


.. code-block:: bash

  for m in greedy_search fast_beam_search modified_beam_search; do
    for iter in 474000; do
      for avg in 8 10 12 14 16 18; do
        ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py \
          --iter $iter \
          --avg $avg \
          --decode-chunk-len 16 \
          --num-decode-streams 100 \
          --exp-dir pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
          --decoding-method $m
      done
    done
  done


.. tip::

  Supporting decoding methods are as follows:

    - ``greedy_search`` : It takes the symbol with largest posterior probability
      of each frame as the decoding result.

    - ``beam_search`` :  It implements Algorithm 1 in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.3711.pdf and
      `espnet/nets/beam_search_transducer.py <https://github.com/espnet/espnet/blob/master/espnet/nets/beam_search_transducer.py#L247>`_
      is used as a reference. Basicly, it keeps topk states for each frame, and expands the kept states with their own contexts to
      next frame.

    - ``modified_beam_search`` : It implements the same algorithm as ``beam_search`` above, but it
      runs in batch mode with ``--max-sym-per-frame=1`` being hardcoded.

    - ``fast_beam_search`` : It implements graph composition between the output ``log_probs`` and
      given ``FSAs``. It is hard to describe the details in several lines of texts, you can read
      our paper in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.00484.pdf or our `rnnt decode code in k2 <https://github.com/k2-fsa/k2/blob/master/k2/csrc/rnnt_decode.h>`_. ``fast_beam_search`` can decode with ``FSAs`` on GPU efficiently.

    - ``fast_beam_search_LG`` : The same as ``fast_beam_search`` above, ``fast_beam_search`` uses
      an trivial graph that has only one state, while ``fast_beam_search_LG`` uses an LG graph
      (with N-gram LM).

    - ``fast_beam_search_nbest`` : It produces the decoding results as follows:

      - (1) Use ``fast_beam_search`` to get a lattice
      - (2) Select ``num_paths`` paths from the lattice using ``k2.random_paths()``
      - (3) Unique the selected paths
      - (4) Intersect the selected paths with the lattice and compute the
            shortest path from the intersection result
      - (5) The path with the largest score is used as the decoding output.

    - ``fast_beam_search_nbest_LG`` : It implements same logic as ``fast_beam_search_nbest``, the
      only difference is that it uses ``fast_beam_search_LG`` to generate the lattice.

.. NOTE::

  The supporting decoding methods in ``streaming_decode.py`` might be less than that in ``decode.py``, if needed,
  you can implement them by yourself or file a issue in `icefall <https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall/issues>`_ .


Export Model
------------

Currently it supports exporting checkpoints from ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp`` in the following ways.

Export ``model.state_dict()``
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Checkpoints saved by ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/train.py`` also include
``optimizer.state_dict()``. It is useful for resuming training. But after training,
we are interested only in ``model.state_dict()``. You can use the following
command to extract ``model.state_dict()``.

.. code-block:: bash

  # Assume that --epoch 30 --avg 9 produces the smallest WER
  # (You can get such information after running ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py)

  epoch=30
  avg=9

  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/export.py \
    --exp-dir ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
    --bpe-model data/lang_bpe_500/bpe.model \
    --epoch $epoch \
    --avg  $avg \
    --use-averaged-model=True \
    --decode-chunk-len 32

It will generate a file ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/pretrained.pt``.

.. hint::

   To use the generated ``pretrained.pt`` for ``pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py``,
   you can run:

   .. code-block:: bash

      cd pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp
      ln -s pretrained.pt epoch-999.pt

   And then pass ``--epoch 999 --avg 1 --use-averaged-model 0`` to
   ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/decode.py``.

To use the exported model with ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/pretrained.py``, you
can run:

.. code-block:: bash

  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/pretrained.py \
    --checkpoint ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/pretrained.pt \
    --bpe-model ./data/lang_bpe_500/bpe.model \
    --method greedy_search \
    --decode-chunk-len 32 \
    /path/to/foo.wav \
    /path/to/bar.wav


Export model using ``torch.jit.script()``
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. code-block:: bash

  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/export.py \
    --exp-dir ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
    --bpe-model data/lang_bpe_500/bpe.model \
    --epoch 30 \
    --avg 9 \
    --decode-chunk-len 32 \
    --jit 1

.. caution::

   ``--decode-chunk-len`` is required to export a ScriptModule.

It will generate a file ``cpu_jit.pt`` in the given ``exp_dir``. You can later
load it by ``torch.jit.load("cpu_jit.pt")``.

Note ``cpu`` in the name ``cpu_jit.pt`` means the parameters when loaded into Python
are on CPU. You can use ``to("cuda")`` to move them to a CUDA device.

Export model using ``torch.jit.trace()``
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. code-block:: bash

  epoch=30
  avg=9

  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/jit_trace_export.py \
    --bpe-model data/lang_bpe_500/bpe.model \
    --use-averaged-model=True \
    --decode-chunk-len 32 \
    --exp-dir ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp \
    --epoch $epoch \
    --avg $avg

.. caution::

   ``--decode-chunk-len`` is required to export a ScriptModule.

It will generate 3 files:

  - ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/encoder_jit_trace.pt``
  - ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/decoder_jit_trace.pt``
  - ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/joiner_jit_trace.pt``

To use the generated files with ``./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/jit_trace_pretrained.py``:

.. code-block:: bash

  ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/jit_trace_pretrained.py \
    --encoder-model-filename ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/encoder_jit_trace.pt \
    --decoder-model-filename ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/decoder_jit_trace.pt \
    --joiner-model-filename ./pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming/exp/joiner_jit_trace.pt \
    --bpe-model ./data/lang_bpe_500/bpe.model \
    --decode-chunk-len 32 \
    /path/to/foo.wav


Download pretrained models
--------------------------

If you don't want to train from scratch, you can download the pretrained models
by visiting the following links:

  - `pruned_transducer_stateless7_streaming <https://huggingface.co/Zengwei/icefall-asr-librispeech-pruned-transducer-stateless7-streaming-2022-12-29>`_

  See `<https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall/blob/master/egs/librispeech/ASR/RESULTS.md>`_
  for the details of the above pretrained models

Deploy with Sherpa
------------------

Please see `<https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/python/streaming_asr/conformer/index.html#>`_
for how to deploy the models in ``sherpa``.