Papers › A Comparative Study on Transformer vs RNN in Speech Applications
A Comparative Study on Transformer vs RNN in Speech Applications
Shigeki Karita, Nanxin Chen, Tomoki Hayashi, Takaaki Hori, Hirofumi Inaguma, Ziyan Jiang, Masao Someki, Nelson Enrique Yalta Soplin, Ryuichi Yamamoto, Xiaofei Wang, Shinji Watanabe, Takenori Yoshimura, Wangyou Zhang
Sequence-to-sequence models have been widely used in end-to-end speech processing, for example, automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translation (ST), and text-to-speech (TTS). This paper focuses on an emergent sequence-to-sequence model called Transformer, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in neural machine translation and other natural language processing applications. We undertook intensive studies in which we experimentally compared and analyzed Transformer and conventional recurrent neural networks (RNN) in a total of 15 ASR, one multilingual ASR, one ST, and two TTS benchmarks. Our experiments revealed various training tips and significant performance benefits obtained with Transformer for each task including the surprising superiority of Transformer in 13/15 ASR benchmarks in comparison with RNN. We are preparing to release Kaldi-style reproducible recipes using open source and publicly available datasets for all the ASR, ST, and TTS tasks for the community to succeed our exciting outcomes.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speech Recognition | AISHELL-1 | CTC/Att | Word Error Rate (WER) | 6.7 | #17 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Speech Recognition | LibriSpeech test-clean | Transformer | Word Error Rate (WER) | 2.6 | #40 of 64 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Speech Recognition | LibriSpeech test-other | Transformer | Word Error Rate (WER) | 5.7 | #35 of 53 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections