Papers › Work in Progress: Linear Transformers for TinyML

Work in Progress: Linear Transformers for TinyML

25 Mar 2024Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE) 2024 3archive 2025-07-28

Moritz Scherer, Cristian Cioflan, Michele Magno, Luca Benini

We present the WaveFormer, a neural network architecture based on a linear attention transformer to enable long sequence inference for TinyML devices. Waveformer achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 98.8 % and 99.1 % on the Google Speech V2 keyword spotting (KWS) dataset for the 12 and 35 class problems with only 130 kB of weight storage, compatible with MCU class devices. Top-1 accuracy is improved by 0.1 and 0.9 percentage points while reducing the model size and number of operations by 2.5× and 4.7× compared to the state of the art. We also propose a hardware-friendly 8-bit integer quantization algorithm for the linear attention operator, enabling efficient deployment on low-cost, ultra-low-power microcontrollers without loss of accuracy.

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Keyword SpottingQuantization

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Keyword Spotting Google Speech Commands WaveFormer Google Speech Commands V2 12 98.8 #20 of 42 Archive leaderboard report
Keyword Spotting Google Speech Commands WaveFormer Google Speech Commands V2 35 99.1 #20 of 42 Archive leaderboard report

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