# Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17537/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition using Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06773/) (2016)
- [Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10283/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Uncertainty in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00047/) (2018)
- [E-Branchformer: Branchformer with Enhanced merging for speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00077/) (2022)
- [Mask CTC: Non-Autoregressive End-to-End ASR with CTC and Mask Predict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08700/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04719/) (2018)
- [Minimum Word Error Rate Training for Attention-based Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01818/) (2017)
- [Sampling-Based Approximations to Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04718/) (2021)
- [Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09860/) (2023)
- [Bayes risk CTC: Controllable CTC alignment in Sequence-to-Sequence tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07499/) (2022)
- [mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04167/) (2024)
- [Minimum Bayes Risk Training for End-to-End Speaker-Attributed ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02921/) (2020)
- [Diversity Explains Inference Scaling Laws: Through a Case Study of Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15021/) (2024)
- [Theoretical Guarantees for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12685/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.