Little Brains, Big Feats: Exploring Compact Language Models

While large language models have been dominating the research landscape recently, small language models remain highly relevant across various domains; yet, they receive far less attention. In this study, we investigate how smaller language models perform during the generation stage within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. To benchmark these models effectively, we utilised both open-source and proprietary datasets covering diverse subject areas and question types. Our findings demonstrate that a RAG system with small language models can be executed directly on-device without requiring any GPU hardware within a reasonable time. The experimental code and links to the supplementary materials can be accessed through the GitHub repository: https://github.com/SibNN/SLM-RAG-EVAL.

asr_eval: Algorithms and tools for multi-reference and streaming speech recognition evaluation

We propose several improvements to the speech recognition evaluation. First, we propose a string alignment algorithm that supports both multi-reference labeling, arbitrary-length insertions and better word alignment. This is especially useful for non-Latin languages, those with rich word formation, to label cluttered or longform speech. Secondly, we collect a novel test set DiverseSpeech-Ru of longform in-the-wild Russian speech with careful multi-reference labeling. We also perform multi-reference relabeling of popular Russian tests set and study fine-tuning dynamics on its corresponding train set. We demonstrate that the model often adopts to dataset-specific labeling, causing an illusion of metric improvement. Based on the improved word alignment, we develop tools to evaluate streaming speech recognition and to align multiple transcriptions to compare them visually. Additionally, we provide uniform wrappers for many offline and streaming speech recognition models. Our code will be made publicly available.