Papers › Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition

Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition

16 May 2020arXiv:2005.08100archive 2025-07-28

Anmol Gulati, James Qin, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Niki Parmar, Yu Zhang, Jiahui Yu, Wei Han, Shibo Wang, Zhengdong Zhang, Yonghui Wu, Ruoming Pang

Recently Transformer and Convolution neural network (CNN) based models have shown promising results in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), outperforming Recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Transformer models are good at capturing content-based global interactions, while CNNs exploit local features effectively. In this work, we achieve the best of both worlds by studying how to combine convolution neural networks and transformers to model both local and global dependencies of an audio sequence in a parameter-efficient way. To this regard, we propose the convolution-augmented transformer for speech recognition, named Conformer. Conformer significantly outperforms the previous Transformer and CNN based models achieving state-of-the-art accuracies. On the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, our model achieves WER of 2.1%/4.3% without using a language model and 1.9%/3.9% with an external language model on test/testother. We also observe competitive performance of 2.7%/6.3% with a small model of only 10M parameters.

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25 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

HarunoriKawano/Conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Joshuaoneheart/Fintech-Final-Report mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Rishit-dagli/Conformer mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
TeaPoly/Conformer-Athena mentioned on GitHubtf report
TensorSpeech/TensorFlowASR mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
alibaba-damo-academy/FunASR mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
augustgw/early-exit-transformer mentioned on GitHubtorch report
jaketae/conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
lucidrains/conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
lucidrains/soundstorm-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
msalhab96/Conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
msalhab96/SpeeQ mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
openspeech-team/openspeech mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
park-cheol/ASR-Conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
phanxuanphucnd/Arizona-asr mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
phanxuanphucnd/conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
seongho608/ringformer mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
sooftware/OpenSpeech mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
sooftware/conformer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tuanio/nextformer mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

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3ran · violated contract
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calc_same_padding lucidrains/conformer/conformer/conformer.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · a41cb31b42e919b1 · report
get_speakers TeaPoly/Conformer-Athena/examples/asr/timit/local/prepare_data.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 2835e46864d2299b · report
check_token msalhab96/Conformer/tokenizer.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · d759ddcfb8763ee8 · report
deserialize TensorSpeech/TensorFlowASR/tensorflow_asr/callbacks.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · efd738a0bc3cc757 · report
skew jaketae/conformer/conformer/attention.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 746f1b671084d3ba · report
default identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · violated contract fingerprinted licence of this copy not recorded · 60fff7c3c400d7ff · report
exists identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · violated contract licence of this copy not recorded · aa5486a3650902d8 · report

Tasks

Automatic Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Language ModelingLanguage ModellingSpeech Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Conformer(L) Word Error Rate (WER) 1.9 #18 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Conformer(M) Word Error Rate (WER) 2 #22 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Conformer(S) Word Error Rate (WER) 2.1 #30 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other Conformer(L) Word Error Rate (WER) 3.9 #14 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other Conformer(M) Word Error Rate (WER) 4.3 #23 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other Conformer(S) Word Error Rate (WER) 5.0 #31 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

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEConvolutionDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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