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Add experimental CTC zh-CN Mandarin ASR (#476)
## Summary This PR adds **experimental** Mandarin Chinese ASR support via the CTC zh-CN model and includes critical Swift 6 concurrency fixes for `SlidingWindowAsrManager`. > **⚠️ Experimental Feature**: CTC zh-CN Mandarin ASR is an early preview. The API and performance characteristics may change in future releases. ## Swift 6 Concurrency Fixes ### Fixed Issues - **Removed premature state mutations** in `processWindow()` that violated Swift 6 actor isolation - State updates (`accumulatedTokens`, `lastProcessedFrame`, `segmentIndex`, `processedChunks`) now occur **after** all async calls complete successfully - Prevents data races when async calls fail mid-execution ### Changes - `SlidingWindowAsrManager.processWindow()`: Moved state mutation to after async guard statements - Ensures atomic state updates only when processing succeeds ## CTC zh-CN Mandarin ASR Integration (Experimental) ### New Features #### Models - **CtcZhCnManager**: High-level API for Mandarin Chinese ASR using CTC decoder - **CtcZhCnModels**: Model management with int8/fp32 encoder variants - Int8: 571 MB (default) - FP32: 1.1 GB - Auto-downloads from HuggingFace: `FluidInference/parakeet-ctc-0.6b-zh-cn-coreml` #### CLI Commands ```bash # Transcribe Mandarin audio swift run fluidaudiocli ctc-zh-cn-transcribe audio.wav # Benchmark on THCHS-30 dataset (full 2,495 samples) swift run fluidaudiocli ctc-zh-cn-benchmark --auto-download # Benchmark subset (100 samples for faster testing) swift run fluidaudiocli ctc-zh-cn-benchmark --auto-download --samples 100 ``` #### Benchmark Results (THCHS-30 Full Test Set) **Full dataset** (2,495 samples): - **Mean CER**: 8.23% - **Median CER**: 6.45% - **CER = 0% (perfect)**: 435 samples (17.4%) - **Distribution**: 67.1% of samples <10% CER, 93.2% <20% CER - **Mean Latency**: 614 ms - **Mean RTFx**: 14.83x ### Dataset **THCHS-30** - Mandarin Chinese speech corpus from Tsinghua University - 30 hours of clean speech - 50 speakers - 2,495 test utterances (10 speakers, 250 unique sentences) - Content domain: News (not classical literature) - Source: http://www.openslr.org/18/ - HuggingFace: `FluidInference/THCHS-30-tests` ### Text Normalization CER calculation includes: - Chinese punctuation removal (,。!?、;:\u{201C}\u{201D}\u{2018}\u{2019}) - English punctuation removal (,.!?;:()[]{}\\<>"'-) - Arabic digit → Chinese character conversion (0→零, 1→一, etc.) - Whitespace normalization - Levenshtein distance calculation ## Devin Review Fixes ✅ Addressed all issues from [Devin code review](https://app.devin.ai/review/fluidinference/fluidaudio/pull/476): ### Review #1 (4 issues) 1. **✅ Fixed digit-to-Chinese conversion** - Added missing normalization (0→零, 1→一, etc.) that was inflating CER by ~1.66% 2. **✅ Added unit tests** - Created 13 comprehensive test cases for text normalization, CER calculation, and Levenshtein distance 3. **✅ Fixed CI dataset cache path** - Not applicable after CI workflow removal 4. **✅ Fixed CI model cache path** - Not applicable after CI workflow removal ### Review #2 (2 issues) 5. **✅ Fixed CER threshold mismatch** - Not applicable after CI workflow removal 6. **✅ Fixed saveResults NaN crash** - Added guard for empty results array to prevent division by zero ### Review #3 (2 issues) 7. **✅ Fixed FP32 encoder download** - Include both int8 and fp32 encoders in `requiredModels` set 8. **✅ Fixed AsrManager CTC-only handling** - Throw explicit error instead of routing to incompatible TDT decoder ### Additional Fixes - **✅ Fixed Unicode curly quotes** - Used escape sequences (`\u{201C}` etc.) in both source and tests - Added missing English punctuation removal - Added missing Chinese quotation mark handling ## Files Changed ### Swift 6 Concurrency - `Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/SlidingWindow/SlidingWindowAsrManager.swift` - `Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/AsrManager.swift` (added .ctcZhCn case + error handling) ### CTC zh-CN Integration - `Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/CtcZhCnManager.swift` (new) - `Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/CtcZhCnModels.swift` (new) - `Sources/FluidAudioCLI/Commands/ASR/CtcZhCnTranscribeCommand.swift` (new) - `Sources/FluidAudioCLI/Commands/ASR/CtcZhCnBenchmark.swift` (new) - `Sources/FluidAudio/ModelNames.swift` (updated - both encoder variants) - `Documentation/Benchmarks.md` (updated - marked experimental) ### Tests - `Tests/FluidAudioTests/ASR/Parakeet/CtcZhCnTests.swift` (new - 13 test cases) ## Testing - [x] Swift 6 concurrency fixes pass existing tests - [x] CTC zh-CN transcription tested manually - [x] THCHS-30 full benchmark: 8.23% mean CER (2,495 samples) - [x] Unit tests: 13 test cases for normalization and CER (100% passing) - [x] Text normalization matches baseline exactly - [x] FP32 encoder download verified ## Notes - This PR is a clean rebase of #475 off main - Skipped conflicting decoder refactoring commit (superseded by #474) - **Experimental feature**: CTC zh-CN API may change in future releases - **No CI workflow**: Benchmarks are run manually for experimental features
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Documentation/Benchmarks.md

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@@ -734,3 +734,52 @@ Both the English BART G2P and multilingual ByT5 G2P models run fastest on CPU-on
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| cpuOnly | **13.0** |
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| all (ANE+GPU+CPU) | 17.3 |
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| cpuAndGPU | 23.4 |
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## CTC zh-CN Mandarin ASR (Experimental)
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Parakeet CTC 0.6B zh-CN model converted to CoreML for on-device Mandarin Chinese transcription.
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> **⚠️ Experimental Feature**: This is an early preview of Mandarin Chinese ASR support. The API and performance characteristics may change in future releases.
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Model: [FluidInference/parakeet-ctc-0.6b-zh-cn-coreml](https://huggingface.co/FluidInference/parakeet-ctc-0.6b-zh-cn-coreml)
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Hardware: Apple M2, 2022, macOS 26
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### THCHS-30 Test Set
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Full benchmark on the complete THCHS-30 test set — 2,495 utterances (250 unique sentences × 10 speakers) from the THCHS-30 corpus.
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Dataset: [FluidInference/THCHS-30-tests](https://huggingface.co/datasets/FluidInference/THCHS-30-tests)
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```bash
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swift run -c release fluidaudiocli ctc-zh-cn-benchmark --auto-download
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```
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| Metric | int8 encoder (0.55 GB) |
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|---|---|
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| **Mean CER** | **8.23%** |
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| **Median CER** | **6.45%** |
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| CER = 0% (perfect) | 435 (17.4%) |
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| CER < 5% | 947 (38.0%) |
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| CER < 10% | 1,674 (67.1%) |
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| CER < 20% | 2,325 (93.2%) |
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| Mean Latency | 614 ms |
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| Mean RTFx | 14.83x |
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### Error Analysis
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Error analysis from the 100 highest-CER samples (out of the full 2,495) identified 862 substitution errors. The dominant patterns:
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- **Homophones / near-homophones**: acoustically similar syllables (e.g. 呢/了, 了/的) account for the majority of substitutions — unavoidable without a language model
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- **Digit representation**: the model may output Arabic digits (1, 5, 2011) when references use Chinese characters (一五, 二零一一); the benchmark normalizer converts digits before scoring to avoid penalizing this
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- **Sentence-final particles**: 了/的/呢/吧 are frequently confused, contributing a disproportionate share of errors given their high occurrence
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### Beam Search
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Beam search does not improve CER for this model without a language model. Greedy decoding (beam width 1) is recommended.
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### Recommendations
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- **Greedy decoding** is sufficient for production use at this CER level.
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- For applications requiring <8% CER, a character-level language model would be needed.
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- Int8 encoder (0.55 GB) performs on par with FP32 (1.1 GB).

Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/AsrManager.swift

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@@ -293,6 +293,10 @@ public actor AsrManager {
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isLastChunk: isLastChunk,
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globalFrameOffset: globalFrameOffset
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)
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case .ctcZhCn:
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throw ASRError.processingFailed(
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"CTC-only model .ctcZhCn does not support TDT decoding. Use CtcZhCnManager instead."
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)
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}
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}
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Sources/FluidAudio/ASR/Parakeet/AsrModels.swift

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@@ -7,12 +7,15 @@ public enum AsrModelVersion: Sendable {
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case v3
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/// 110M parameter hybrid TDT-CTC model with fused preprocessor+encoder
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case tdtCtc110m
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/// 600M parameter CTC-only model for Mandarin Chinese (zh-CN)
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case ctcZhCn
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var repo: Repo {
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switch self {
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case .v2: return .parakeetV2
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case .v3: return .parakeet
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case .tdtCtc110m: return .parakeetTdtCtc110m
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case .ctcZhCn: return .parakeetCtcZhCn
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}
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}
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}
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}
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/// Whether this model is CTC-only (no TDT decoder+joint)
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public var isCtcOnly: Bool {
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switch self {
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case .ctcZhCn: return true
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default: return false
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}
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}
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/// Encoder hidden dimension for this model version
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public var encoderHiddenSize: Int {
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switch self {
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case .tdtCtc110m: return 512
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case .ctcZhCn: return 1024
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default: return 1024
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}
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}
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switch self {
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case .v2, .tdtCtc110m: return 1024
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case .v3: return 8192
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case .ctcZhCn: return 7000
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}
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}
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@preconcurrency import CoreML
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import Foundation
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/// Manager for Parakeet CTC zh-CN transcription
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///
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/// This manager handles the full pipeline for Mandarin Chinese CTC transcription:
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/// 1. Preprocessor: Audio → Mel spectrogram
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/// 2. Encoder: Mel → Encoder features
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/// 3. CTC Decoder: Encoder features → CTC logits
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/// 4. Greedy CTC decoding: Logits → Text
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public actor CtcZhCnManager {
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private let models: CtcZhCnModels
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private let maxAudioSamples: Int
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private let sampleRate: Int
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private static let logger = AppLogger(category: "CtcZhCnManager")
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/// Initialize with pre-loaded models
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public init(models: CtcZhCnModels, maxAudioSamples: Int = 240_000, sampleRate: Int = 16_000) {
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self.models = models
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self.maxAudioSamples = maxAudioSamples
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self.sampleRate = sampleRate
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}
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/// Convenience initializer that loads models from default cache directory
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public static func load(
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useInt8Encoder: Bool = true,
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configuration: MLModelConfiguration? = nil,
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progressHandler: DownloadUtils.ProgressHandler? = nil
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) async throws -> CtcZhCnManager {
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let models = try await CtcZhCnModels.downloadAndLoad(
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useInt8Encoder: useInt8Encoder,
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configuration: configuration,
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progressHandler: progressHandler
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)
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return CtcZhCnManager(models: models)
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}
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/// Transcribe audio to text using CTC decoding
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///
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/// - Parameters:
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/// - audio: Audio samples (mono, 16kHz)
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/// - audioLength: Optional audio length (if nil, uses audio.count)
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/// - Returns: Transcribed text
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public func transcribe(
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audio: [Float],
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audioLength: Int? = nil
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) throws -> String {
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let actualLength = audioLength ?? audio.count
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// Pad or truncate audio to maxAudioSamples
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let paddedAudio = padOrTruncateAudio(audio, targetLength: maxAudioSamples)
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// Step 1: Preprocessor (audio → mel spectrogram)
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let melOutput = try runPreprocessor(audio: paddedAudio, audioLength: actualLength)
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// Step 2: Encoder (mel → encoder features)
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let encoderOutput = try runEncoder(mel: melOutput.mel, melLength: melOutput.melLength)
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// Step 3: CTC Decoder (encoder features → CTC logits)
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let ctcLogits = try runCtcDecoder(encoderOutput: encoderOutput)
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// Step 4: CTC decoding (logits → text)
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let text = greedyCtcDecode(logits: ctcLogits)
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return text
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}
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/// Transcribe audio file to text
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///
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/// - Parameters:
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/// - audioURL: URL to audio file (will be resampled to 16kHz mono)
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/// - Returns: Transcribed text
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public func transcribe(audioURL: URL) throws -> String {
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// Load and convert audio
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let converter = AudioConverter(sampleRate: Double(sampleRate))
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let samples = try converter.resampleAudioFile(audioURL)
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return try transcribe(audio: samples)
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}
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// MARK: - Private Pipeline Methods
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private struct MelOutput {
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let mel: MLMultiArray
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let melLength: MLMultiArray
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}
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private func runPreprocessor(audio: [Float], audioLength: Int) throws -> MelOutput {
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// Create input arrays
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let audioArray = try MLMultiArray(shape: [1, maxAudioSamples as NSNumber], dataType: .float32)
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for (i, sample) in audio.enumerated() where i < maxAudioSamples {
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audioArray[i] = NSNumber(value: sample)
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}
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let audioLengthArray = try MLMultiArray(shape: [1], dataType: .int32)
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audioLengthArray[0] = NSNumber(value: min(audioLength, maxAudioSamples))
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// Run preprocessor
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let input = try MLDictionaryFeatureProvider(
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dictionary: [
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"audio_signal": MLFeatureValue(multiArray: audioArray),
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"audio_length": MLFeatureValue(multiArray: audioLengthArray),
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]
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)
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let output = try models.preprocessor.prediction(from: input)
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guard
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let mel = output.featureValue(for: "mel")?.multiArrayValue,
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let melLength = output.featureValue(for: "mel_length")?.multiArrayValue
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else {
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throw ASRError.processingFailed("Failed to extract mel or mel_length from preprocessor output")
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}
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return MelOutput(mel: mel, melLength: melLength)
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}
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private func runEncoder(mel: MLMultiArray, melLength: MLMultiArray) throws -> MLMultiArray {
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// Run encoder
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let input = try MLDictionaryFeatureProvider(
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dictionary: [
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"audio_signal": MLFeatureValue(multiArray: mel),
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"length": MLFeatureValue(multiArray: melLength),
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]
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)
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let output = try models.encoder.prediction(from: input)
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guard let encoderOutput = output.featureValue(for: "encoder_output")?.multiArrayValue else {
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throw ASRError.processingFailed("Failed to extract encoder_output from encoder")
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}
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return encoderOutput
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}
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private func runCtcDecoder(encoderOutput: MLMultiArray) throws -> MLMultiArray {
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// Run CTC decoder head
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let input = try MLDictionaryFeatureProvider(
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dictionary: [
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"encoder_output": MLFeatureValue(multiArray: encoderOutput)
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]
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)
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let output = try models.decoder.prediction(from: input)
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guard let ctcLogits = output.featureValue(for: "ctc_logits")?.multiArrayValue else {
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throw ASRError.processingFailed("Failed to extract ctc_logits from decoder")
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}
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return ctcLogits
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}
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private func greedyCtcDecode(logits: MLMultiArray) -> String {
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// logits shape: [1, T, vocab_size+1] where T is time steps (188)
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// vocab_size = 7000, blank_id = 7000
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let timeSteps = logits.shape[1].intValue
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let vocabSize = logits.shape[2].intValue
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var decoded: [Int] = []
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var prevLabel: Int? = nil
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for t in 0..<timeSteps {
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// Find argmax at this time step
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var maxLogit: Float = -.infinity
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var maxLabel = 0
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for v in 0..<vocabSize {
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let logit = logits[[0, t as NSNumber, v as NSNumber]].floatValue
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if logit > maxLogit {
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maxLogit = logit
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maxLabel = v
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}
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}
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// CTC collapse: skip blanks and repeats
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if maxLabel != models.blankId && maxLabel != prevLabel {
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decoded.append(maxLabel)
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}
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prevLabel = maxLabel
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}
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// Convert token IDs to text
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var text = ""
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for tokenId in decoded {
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if let token = models.vocabulary[tokenId] {
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text += token
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}
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}
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// Replace SentencePiece underscores with spaces
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text = text.replacingOccurrences(of: "", with: " ")
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return text.trimmingCharacters(in: .whitespacesAndNewlines)
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}
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private func padOrTruncateAudio(_ audio: [Float], targetLength: Int) -> [Float] {
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var result = audio
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if result.count < targetLength {
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// Pad with zeros
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result.append(contentsOf: Array(repeating: 0.0, count: targetLength - result.count))
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} else if result.count > targetLength {
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// Truncate
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result = Array(result.prefix(targetLength))
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}
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return result
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}
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}

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