New AI Trick Makes Voice Tech Work on Tiny Devices, Using Half the Power

A new paper introduces DuSpaR (Dual-state Sparsifying Recurrent Unit), a computationally efficient building block for speech processing models on resource-constrained edge devices. It uses dual-state recurrence to modulate its input vectors in a stateful feedback loop, and its recurrent cells sparsify the input vector operand involved in matrix-vector multiplication using ReLU activation — by skipping the zero entries dynamically, inference-time savings in multiply-accumulate operations and weight memory fetches can be achieved.

Authors Zixiao Li, Sheng Zhou, Longbiao Cheng, and Shih-Chii Liu evaluated DuSpaR on three speech tasks: keyword spotting (KWS) on the Google Speech Commands dataset, spoken language understanding (SLU) on the Fluent Speech Commands dataset, and speech enhancement (SE) on the Voice Bank + Demand (VBD) dataset. At similar parameter counts, DuSpaR requires 51.0% and 68.4% less computation than a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) on KWS and SLU, respectively, while achieving higher accuracy, and 50.1% less computation on SE while maintaining similar quality. At comparable computational cost and across a range of model sizes, DuSpaR also achieves higher KWS/SLU accuracy and better SE quality than other sparsity-aware recurrent models. Ablation studies show that, compared with the single-state recurrence baseline, dual-state recurrence reduces the effective compute by factors of 3.1 to 11.3 at similar task performance.