Research comparing the search-space complexity and efficiency of CTC and neural transcription models.
The paper was published on October 24, 2026, on arXiv (ID 2610.31259v1), and systematically compares the search-space complexity and inference efficiency of two types of end-to-end speech recognition (ASR) models—connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and neural transducer—under various pruning strategies and language-model configurations.
Why it matters：The paper, based on empirical analysis, points out that although end-to-end ASR models typically maintain a small search space most of the time, they exhibit significant transient spikes in the number of hypotheses during periods of speech uncertainty; dynamic score-based pruning can adapt to model uncertainty, substantially reducing the real-time factor (RTF) and providing practical guidance for efficient search.