PLAN_AND_PROGRESS.md

# Finnish ASR: Canary-v2 Finetuning & Progress

This document provides a high-level overview of our Finnish ASR finetuning process, model architecture, and current progress for the Data Science team.

---

## 📊 Project Overview
Our goal is to adapt NVIDIA's **Canary-v2** (a 1-billion parameter multilingual model) for high-accuracy Finnish Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We leverage four diverse datasets to ensure robustness across different domains and speaking styles.

---

## 🏗️ Model Architecture
Canary-v2 is an **Attention-Encoder-Decoder (AED)** model that utilizes the **Fast-Conformer** architecture. This design allows for efficient processing of long audio sequences while maintaining high accuracy.

```mermaid

graph TD

    A[Audio Input] -->|Preprocessing| B[Mel Spectrogram]

    

    subgraph TrainingBlock [Finetuned Components]

        direction TB

        subgraph Encoder [Encoder: Acoustic Modeling]

            C1[Convolutional Subsampling] -->|Downsample| C2[Conformer Blocks]

            C2 -->|Latent Features| C_Out[Acoustic Latents]

        end



        subgraph Decoder [Decoder: Language Modeling]

            D1[Masked Self-Attention] --> D2[Cross-Attention]

            D2 --> D3[Feed Forward]

            D3 --> D_Out[Text Generation]

        end

    end



    B -->|Input| C1

    P[Input Prompts:<br/>Lang, Task, PnC] -->|Conditioning| D1

    C_Out -->|Acoustic Context| D2

    D_Out -->|Output| E[Finnish Text]



    %% Styling

    style TrainingBlock fill:#f0f7ff,stroke:#0052cc,stroke-width:3px,stroke-dasharray: 5 5

    style A fill:#ffffff,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px

    style B fill:#ffffff,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px

    style P fill:#ffffff,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px

    style E fill:#e6ffed,stroke:#28a745,stroke-width:2px

    

    style Encoder fill:#ffffff,stroke:#0052cc,stroke-width:1px

    style Decoder fill:#ffffff,stroke:#0052cc,stroke-width:1px

```

### Component Roles & Finetuning:
- **Highlighted Area (Blue Dashed Box)**: This represents the core weights of the **Canary-v2** model. During our finetuning, we update the parameters in both the **Encoder** and **Decoder** to specifically recognize Finnish phonemes and grammar.
- **Mel Spectrogram**: The "Vision" stage. It turns raw audio waves into a structured 2D representation of sound frequencies over time.
- **Fast-Conformer Encoder**: The "Acoustic Processor." We finetuned this to understand the unique sounds of the Finnish language (like double vowels and consonants).
- **Input Prompts**: The "Context Injector." These are the same color as other inputs because they are part of the model's standard input pipeline, telling it: "Act as a Finnish ASR system."
- **Attention-Decoder**: The "Linguistic Brain." We finetuned this to map the Finnish sounds from the encoder into grammatically correct Finnish text, guided by the prompts.

---

## 🔄 Finetuning Workflow
Our pipeline is fully automated, from data ingestion to multi-dataset evaluation.

```mermaid

graph TD

    subgraph DataPrep [Data Preparation]

        D1[CSS10 Finnish] --> P[Unified Processing Script]

        D2[FLEURS Finnish] --> P

        D3[VoxPopuli Finnish] --> P

        D4[Common Voice v24] --> P

        P --> M1[train_manifest.json]

        P --> M2[eval_fleurs.json]

        P --> M3[eval_common_voice.json]

        P --> M4[eval_css10.json]

        P --> M5[eval_voxpopuli.json]

    end



    subgraph Training [Canary-v2 Finetuning]

        M1 --> T[NVIDIA NeMo Trainer]

        CM[nvidia/canary-1b-v2] --> T

        T --> CK[Model Checkpoints]

        M2 & M3 & M4 & M5 --> V[Multi-Validation]

        V --> W[WandB Tracking]

    end



    subgraph Inference [Post-Processing]

        CK --> Inf[Inference]

        Inf --> K[KenLM/NGPU-LM Integration]

        K --> R[Final ASR Output]

    end

```

---

## 📚 Datasets
We use a balanced mix of datasets to cover various audio qualities and transcript styles:

| Dataset | Source | Characteristics |
|---------|--------|-----------------|
| **FLEURS** | Google | High-quality, diverse speakers (Benchmark) |
| **Common Voice** | Mozilla | Crowdsourced, varied quality and accents |
| **CSS10** | Single Speaker | Clean, high-quality audio books |
| **VoxPopuli** | EU Parliament | European Parliament speeches (Formal) |

---

## 📊 Training Data Analysis

This section documents the composition and length distribution of our training data (from `RASMUS/canary-finnish-asr-data`, accessed 2026-02-26).

### Dataset Summary

| Dataset | Samples | Mean Duration | Max Duration | Total Hours |
|---------|---------|--------------|-------------|-------------|
| **Common Voice v24** | 9,086 | 4.5s | 10.5s | 11.2h |
| **VoxPopuli** | 8,164 | 10.1s | 50.5s | 23.0h |
| **CSS10** | 3,226 | 7.7s | 20.2s | 6.9h |
| **FLEURS** | 2,704 | 11.7s | 43.2s | 8.8h |
| **TOTAL** | **23,180** | **7.8s** | **50.5s** | **~50h** |

### Duration Distribution (Training Set)

```

 0–5s   : 33.3%  (7,725 samples)  ████████████████████████████████████████

 5–10s  : 43.7%  (10,139 samples) █████████████████████████████████████████████████████

10–15s  : 15.0%  (3,473 samples)  ██████████████████

15–20s  :  5.4%  (1,241 samples)  ██████

20–30s  :  2.4%  (562 samples)    ███

  >30s  :  0.2%  (40 samples)

```

**Key insight:** 77% of training samples are shorter than 10 seconds. The model has very little exposure to longer audio segments (only 0.2% are >30s). This has direct implications for long-form inference stability.

### Evaluation Set Durations

| Eval Set | Samples | Mean Duration | Max Duration |
|----------|---------|--------------|-------------|
| FLEURS   | 918     | 13.0s        | 33.7s       |
| Common Voice | 1,554 | 5.1s       | 10.5s       |
| CSS10    | 170     | 7.5s         | 10.2s       |
| VoxPopuli | 430   | 10.6s        | 47.5s       |

---

## 🔢 Number Handling Analysis

### Live Inference Results: Base vs Finetuned (2026-02-26)

We ran both models on 5 FLEURS test samples to determine each model's number output style.

| # | Scenario | Reference | Base Canary-v2 | Our Finetuned |
|---|----------|-----------|----------------|---------------|
| 1 | Spoken "sata" (hundred) | `yli sata vuotta` | `yli 100 vuotta` ❌ | `yli 100 vuotta` ❌ |
| 2 | Spoken "seitsemäntoista" (17) | `surmaten seitsemäntoista henkeä` | `surmaten 17 henkeä` ❌ | `surmaten seitsemäntoista henkeä` ✅ |
| 3 | Digits in reference (15, 2011, 2017) | `15 metriä... 2011... 2017` | Correct ✅ | Correct ✅ |
| 4 | Abbreviation "jKr." (AD) | `400 jKr.` | `400 jälkeen Kristuksen` | `400 jälkeen Kristuksen` |
| 5 | Range "25–30" (en-dash U+2013) | `25–30 vuodella` | `25-30 vuodella` (ASCII hyphen) | `25 ⁇ 30 vuodella` ❌ UNK token |

**Key findings:**

1. **Base model outputs digits.** When the speaker says "sata" (hundred) or "seitsemäntoista" (seventeen), the base Canary-v2 outputs `100` and `17`. This is NVIDIA's built-in text normalisation — Canary always outputs digit form for numbers.

2. **Finetuning introduced inconsistency.** Our finetuning partially reversed this: for `seitsemäntoista` the finetuned model now outputs the written word (because FLEURS training transcripts used written-out numbers), but still outputs `100` for `sata`. This inconsistency is worse than either consistent policy.

3. **En-dash produces a UNK token in the finetuned model.** The character `–` (U+2013 en-dash) in `25–30` causes the finetuned model to emit `⁇` (SentencePiece UNK). The base model degrades gracefully to an ASCII hyphen `25-30`. This is a regression introduced by finetuning — likely because the en-dash was absent or inconsistently encoded in our training data.

4. **Abbreviations are expanded by both models.** `jKr.` → `jälkeen Kristuksen` in both — this is model behaviour, not a finetuning artifact.

### Policy Decision
**We want digit output** (not written-out Finnish number words). The base model's behaviour is correct here. The finetuned model regressed on consistency because our FLEURS training transcripts used written-out numbers.

### Training Data Issues Found
- Only **2.5% (578 / 23,180)** of training samples contain digit characters at all.
- FLEURS transcripts use written-out numbers (`sata vuotta`) while VoxPopuli and Common Voice use digits. This gives the model conflicting signal.
- En-dash (`–` U+2013) may be absent or mis-encoded in training manifests, causing UNK tokens at inference time.

### Action Plan: Numbers & UNK Token

#### Step 1 — Normalise training transcripts to digit form
Run a pre-processing pass on `train_manifest.json` before the next training run:
- Use the Python library `num2words` with locale `fi` to convert Finnish written-out numbers to digits: e.g. `sata` → `100`, `seitsemäntoista` → `17`.
- OR (simpler / safer): replace the FLEURS transcripts in the manifest with their **raw reference texts which already have digits** (FLEURS provides both `raw_transcription` and `transcription` columns; currently we use `raw_transcription` which has written numbers).
- Target: **all numeric quantities consistently in digit form** across all four datasets.

#### Step 2 — Fix en-dash encoding (ROOT CAUSE CONFIRMED)

**Confirmed via tokenizer inspection (2026-02-26):**

```python

m.tokenizer.text_to_ids("25–30")  # → [16053, 1125, 1128, 0, 1126, 1123]

#                                              ↑ id 0 = UNK for the en-dash!

m.tokenizer.text_to_ids("25-30")  # → [16053, 1125, 1128, 16107, 1126, 1123]

#                                              ↑ ASCII hyphen tokenises correctly

```

- **En-dash `–` (U+2013) and em-dash `—` (U+2014) are NOT in the CanaryBPETokenizer vocabulary** (both map to UNK id 0).
- Training data contains **85 entries with en-dash** (83 FLEURS, 2 Common Voice). During training, the en-dash in the TARGET text was encoded as UNK, so the model learned to produce UNK for the corresponding speech sounds.
- **Fix: replace all `–` and `—` with ASCII hyphen `-` in all training transcripts** before the next training run. This is a one-line preprocessing step.

```python

# In manifest preprocessing:

text = text.replace('\u2013', '-').replace('\u2014', '-')

```

#### Step 3 — Re-evaluate after normalisation
After normalising transcripts, re-run the 5-sample live inference test to verify:
- `sata vuotta` audio → model outputs `100 vuotta`
- `seitsemäntoista` audio → model outputs `17`
- `25–30` audio → model outputs `25-30` or `25–30` (no UNK)

---

## 🔈 Long-Form Audio: Root Cause Analysis

Our test file `moo.wav` is **30 minutes** (1,800s) of continuous Finnish speech. This reveals a core gap vs. our finetuned Whisper model.

### How Canary-v2 Handles Long Audio (Natively)
- NVIDIA's Canary-v2 uses **dynamic chunking** with 1-second overlap between chunks.
- This is automatically triggered for audio longer than **40 seconds**.
- The model was pre-trained on a 1.7M-hour multilingual corpus with this chunking strategy baked in.

### Our Current Approach (`inference_vad.py`)

1. Silero VAD detects speech segments.

2. Segments are merged into chunks up to `chunk_len` seconds (default: **15s**).
3. Each chunk is transcribed **independently** — no shared context between chunks.

### Root Causes of Degradation on Long-Form

| Issue | Detail |
|-------|--------|
| **Training length mismatch** | 77% of fine-tuning data is <10s. Inference chunks at 15s are longer than nearly all training examples, creating distribution shift. |
| **No cross-chunk context** | Each 15s chunk is transcribed in isolation. Canary's attention decoder has no memory of previous chunks, so topic/speaker continuity is lost at boundaries. |
| **VAD vs. native chunking** | Our VAD-based approach differs from Canary's built-in dynamic chunking. The model was not fine-tuned with this chunking strategy. |
| **Repetition / hallucination** | At chunk boundaries with silence or music, the decoder can loop. This is worsened when segments are near the edge of the model's training length distribution. |
| **No overlap** | Without overlap between chunks, words at segment boundaries can be dropped or doubled. |

### Comparison: Canary vs. Our Finetuned Whisper on Long-Form

Whisper was explicitly designed and trained for long-form audio with:
- Sliding window inference with overlap
- Previous-chunk text as conditioning (prompt-based context)
- Timestamps for alignment

Canary's AED architecture does not use previous-chunk text as input, making long-form continuity fundamentally harder to achieve without careful chunk overlap and stitching.

---

## 🚀 Progress & Results

### Current Status: **Model Released & Repository Consolidated**
We have successfully completed the finetuning, KenLM integration, and repository consolidation phases. The model and its associated language models are now hosted on Hugging Face at `RASMUS/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2`.

- **Infrastructure:** Finetuned on **RTX 6000 PRO Blackwell** (96 GB VRAM) on Verda.com platform in Finland.
- **Model Suite:** Acoustic model + 3 KenLM variants (1M, 2M, 5M sentences).
- **Best Performance (with KenLM 5M):**
    - **FLEURS:** 7.86% WER
    - **Common Voice:** 4.70% WER
    - **CSS10:** 7.07% WER
    - **VoxPopuli:** 11.65% WER
- **Deployment:** Integrated Silero VAD-based inference for robust long-form audio processing.

### Next Steps:
1.  **Long-form Tuning:** Reduce default `chunk_len` to 8–10s (closer to training distribution median) and add 0.5–1s overlap between chunks to reduce boundary artifacts.
2.  **Data Quality Audit:** Fix 28 confirmed corrupted Common Voice entries where raw TSV metadata (client ID hashes, gender tags) was accidentally written into the `text` field. Audit VoxPopuli for missing capitalisation (all-lowercase transcripts despite `pnc: yes`).
3.  **Number Handling:** Add Finnish-specific training data with numeric content. Consider TTS-synthesised samples covering phone numbers, years, statistics, and measurements (both digit and written-out forms paired).
4.  **Long-form Training Data:** Incorporate longer audio segments: TTS synthetic long-form audio (`fbc_monolog_processed`, parliament data) into the training manifest to shift the duration distribution toward 15–30s.
5.  **KenLM Refinement:** Re-train KenLM with high-quality punctuated text. Current LM trained on mixed-quality data.
6.  **Advanced Evaluation:** Implement CER evaluation on non-normalised test sets to better capture punctuation/casing accuracy.
7.  **Repetition Penalty:** Explore repetition penalty in decoding if chunk-level loops persist after chunk length tuning.
8.  **Real-world Evaluation:** Benchmark on diverse long-form samples (podcasts, meetings, call-centre audio).

---

## 🗺️ Action Plan: Next Training Run

This section details the concrete steps for the next finetuning iteration, based on the root-cause analysis above.

### Priority 1 — Fix Training Data (before re-training)

#### 1a. Normalise numbers to digit form (Gemini Flash)
Finnish written-out numbers in FLEURS transcripts cause the finetuned model to output inconsistent number forms. We will use the Gemini Flash API to convert all training transcripts in a single batch pass:

```python

# Pseudocode — run once on train_manifest.json before next training

import google.generativeai as genai

import json



genai.configure(api_key=GEMINI_API_KEY)

model = genai.GenerativeModel("gemini-2.0-flash")



SYSTEM_PROMPT = """You are a Finnish text normalizer.

Convert any written-out Finnish numbers, ordinals, or number words in the text to digit form.

Examples:

  "yli sata vuotta" → "yli 100 vuotta"

  "seitsemäntoista henkeä" → "17 henkeä"

  "vuonna tuhat yhdeksänsataa" → "vuonna 1900"

Keep all other text exactly as-is. Return only the modified text, nothing else."""



entries = []

with open('manifests/train_manifest.json') as f:

    for line in f:

        d = json.loads(line)

        response = model.generate_content(f"{SYSTEM_PROMPT}\n\n{d['text']}")

        d['text'] = response.text.strip()

        entries.append(d)



with open('manifests/train_manifest_normalised.json', 'w') as f:

    for e in entries:

        f.write(json.dumps(e, ensure_ascii=False) + '\n')

```

Cost estimate: 23,180 entries × ~50 tokens average = ~1.2M tokens. At Gemini Flash pricing (~$0.075/1M tokens input) ≈ **< $0.10 total**.

#### 1b. Fix en-dash UNK token (confirmed root cause)
The en-dash `–` (U+2013) is NOT in the tokenizer vocabulary — it maps to UNK (id 0). Replace it with ASCII hyphen before training:

```python

# Add to the manifest preprocessing step

text = text.replace('\u2013', '-').replace('\u2014', '-')

```

This affects **85 entries** in `train_manifest.json` (83 FLEURS, 2 Common Voice).

#### 1c. Fix 28 corrupted Common Voice entries
Replace entries where the `text` field contains raw TSV metadata (tabs + client_id hashes). Strip everything after the first tab character.



---



### Priority 2 — Add Long-Form Training Data



#### TTS Long-Form Dataset: `RASMUS/canary_asr_finetune_tts_long_data`

| Property | Value |
|----------|-------|
| Size | 8.0 GB zip |
| Format | FLAC audio + JSONL manifest |
| Mean duration | **16.5s** (vs 7.8s in current data) |
| Median duration | 15.9s |
| Max duration | 25.0s |
| Content | Finnish speech: lectures, podcasts, YouTube |
| Segments >20s | ~25% |

This dataset directly addresses the training length mismatch. Adding it will shift the duration distribution from a mean of 7.8s toward ~10–12s and significantly increase the proportion of 15–25s segments that match inference chunk lengths.

**Integration plan:**
```bash

# Download the dataset

curl -L -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HF_TOKEN}" \

  "https://huggingface.co/datasets/RASMUS/canary_asr_finetune_tts_long_data/resolve/main/canary_dataset.zip" \

  -o /workspace/data/tts_long_data.zip



# Extract

unzip /workspace/data/tts_long_data.zip -d /workspace/data/tts_long_data/



# Apply number normalisation and dash fix to canary_manifest.jsonl

# then merge with existing train_manifest_normalised.json

```

After applying number normalisation and dash fixes to the new manifest, concatenate with the existing training set. Expected combined size: ~23,180 + N (estimate 5,000–20,000+ entries depending on total dataset size).

---

### Priority 3 — Inference Tuning (without re-training)

Even before re-training, we can improve `moo.wav` performance by adjusting `inference_vad.py`:

| Parameter | Current | Recommended |
|-----------|---------|-------------|
| `chunk_len` | 15s | 8–10s (match training median of 7.8s) |
| chunk overlap | 0s | 0.5s (reduce boundary word drops) |
| `alpha` (KenLM) | 0.2 | Try 0.1–0.15 (current may over-constrain decoder) |

---

## 🔄 Round 2: Data Pipeline & Splits

This section documents the data preparation methodology for Round 2 finetuning, including all new eval sets, the TTS integration, and the final manifest composition.

### Overview of Changes vs Round 1

| Item | Round 1 | Round 2 |
|------|---------|---------|
| Base model | `canary-1b-v2.nemo` | `canary-1b-v2.nemo` (fresh start) |
| Training samples | 23,180 | **28,858** |
| Training hours | ~50h | **75.6h** |
| Mean duration | 7.8s | **9.4s** |
| Max duration allowed | 20.0s | **30.0s** |
| Transcripts normalised | No | **Yes (digits, dashes fixed)** |
| Eval sets | 4 | **6** |

### Step 1 — Transcript Normalisation (`normalize_manifests.py`)



All training transcripts were cleaned in two layers:



**Deterministic fixes (no API call needed):**

- En-dash `–` (U+2013) and em-dash `—` (U+2014) → ASCII hyphen `-` (fixes UNK token regression)

- Corrupted Common Voice entries (raw TSV metadata in `text` field) → strip everything after first tab



**Gemini 2.5 Flash API calls (2,586 of 23,180 entries needed conversion):**

- Pre-filtered with a Finnish number-word regex so only entries that actually contain written numbers are sent to the API (cost: ~$0.62)

- Written Finnish numbers converted to digit form: `sata vuotta` → `100 vuotta`, `seitsemäntoista` → `17`

- Explicit DO NOT CONVERT rules: ordinals (`ensimmäinen`, `toinen`), superlative constructions (`yksi tärkeimmistä`), and `toinen` as "another/other"



### Step 2 — TTS Long-Form Data Integration



Downloaded `RASMUS/canary_asr_finetune_tts_long_data` (4.8 GB, 6,365 entries, mean 16.4s).

Aligned to NeMo training format:
- Path rewritten to relative style: `data/tts_long_data/audio/{filename}`
- Fields mapped: `language` → `source_lang`/`target_lang`, `task: "transcription"` → `taskname: "asr"`, added `pnc: "yes"`
- Same Gemini normalisation pass applied (888 entries converted)

### Step 3 — Eval Set Construction (TTS Data)

The 6,365 normalised TTS entries were split into train / eval / long-form-test:

```

All TTS entries (6,365)

│

├── Long-form pool (>20s): 1,501 entries

│   ├── eval_long_form (sampled): 200 entries  ← random.seed(42) shuffle → first 200

│   └── Returned to training pool: 1,301 entries

│

└── Medium pool (10–20s): 4,864 entries

    ├── eval_tts (10% hold-out): 487 entries  ← stratified by duration bucket

    └── tts_train: 4,377 entries

```

**Why eval_long_form = 200 entries?**
The original 1,501 long-form entries (>20s) had a total duration of ~9.4 hours — far too long to run as a validation set every epoch. At batch_size=32 on a single GPU, each validation pass over 1,501 entries takes ~25 minutes, adding 2.5h per epoch. 200 entries (≈75 minutes of audio) provides a representative sample of the long-form distribution at reasonable cost: ~4 minutes of eval time per epoch.



**eval_tts construction:**

487 entries were held out from the 10–20s duration range (10% stratified sample). This tests the model's ability to handle medium-length audio and is separate from the original 4 eval sets.



### Step 4 — Combined Training Manifest



Final `train_manifest_combined.jsonl` composition:



| Source | Entries | Notes |

|--------|---------|-------|

| Original train (normalised) | 23,180 | Digits + dash fix applied |

| TTS train (10–20s) | 4,377 | Synthesised long-form speech |

| Long-form overflow | 1,301 | >20s entries not selected for eval_long_form |

| **Total** | **28,858** | Mean 9.4s, 75.6h |



### Final Eval Sets (Round 2)



| Set | File | Entries | Mean Duration | Purpose |

|-----|------|---------|--------------|---------|

| `eval_fleurs` | `eval_fleurs.json` | 918 | 13.0s | Primary benchmark (monitored for checkpointing) |

| `eval_common_voice` | `eval_common_voice.json` | 1,554 | 5.1s | Crowdsourced quality |

| `eval_css10` | `eval_css10.json` | 170 | 7.5s | Clean single-speaker |

| `eval_voxpopuli` | `eval_voxpopuli.json` | 430 | 10.6s | Formal/parliament speech |

| `eval_tts` | `eval_tts.jsonl` | 487 | 14.5s | Medium-length TTS (new) |

| `eval_long_form` | `eval_long_form.jsonl` | **200** | 22.5s | Long-form >20s sample (new) |



**Checkpoint monitoring:** `val_wer` tracks FLEURS (first validation set). All 6 WERs are logged independently to WandB.

### Round 2 Training Config

File: `configs/canary_finetune_finnish_v2.yaml`
Key settings:
- `init_from_nemo_model`: `/workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/models/canary-1b-v2.nemo` (fresh start from base)
- `max_duration`: 30.0s (up from 20.0s to include TTS segments up to 25s)
- `max_steps`: 18,000 (scaled: 28,858 / 32 ≈ 902 steps/epoch × 20 epochs ≈ 18,040)
- `lr`: 1e-5, `WarmupAnnealing`, 500 warmup steps
- `precision`: bf16, single GPU, `strategy: auto`

---

## 🛠️ Workflow Status Details

### 1. Data Preparation - DONE
- [x] Identify and inventory all 4 datasets
- [x] Create unified processing script (`scripts/prepare_all_manifests.py`)
- [x] Run `scripts/prepare_all_manifests.py` on devcontainer
- [x] Verify manifest sample counts and audio file integrity

### 2. Configuration Setup - DONE
- [x] Create Hydra training config (`configs/canary_finetune_finnish.yaml`)
- [x] Configure multi-validation with 4 eval datasets
- [x] Checkpoint monitors primary eval set (FLEURS) via `val_wer`
- [x] All 4 eval WERs logged independently to WandB

### 3. Training - DONE
- [x] Run finetuning via `run_training.sh`
- [x] Monitor per-dataset WER in WandB

### 4. KenLM / NGPU-LM Language Model Integration - DONE
- [x] Install KenLM tools (`install_beamsearch_decoders.sh`)
- [x] Gather Finnish text (ASR transcripts + Wikipedia + mc4)
- [x] Train 3 variants of KenLM (1M, 2M, 5M sentences)
- [x] Evaluate with LM fusion on all 4 test sets

### 5. Repository & Long-Form Inference - IN PROGRESS
- [x] Consolidate README and model metadata for Hugging Face release
- [x] Upload model checkpoints and KenLM bundles to HF Hub
- [x] Implement Silero VAD-based chunking for long-form audio (`inference_vad.py`)
- [x] Root-cause analysis of long-form degradation vs. Whisper (see above)
- [ ] Reduce `chunk_len` to 8–10s and add chunk overlap (Current Focus)
- [ ] Optimize `alpha` for stability on `moo.wav` (30 min test file)

### 6. Data Quality & Advanced Evaluation - PARTIALLY DONE
- [x] Fix 28 corrupted Common Voice manifest entries (raw TSV data in text field) — done in normalisation pass.
- [x] Fix en-dash/em-dash UNK token regression — done in normalisation pass.
- [ ] Audit VoxPopuli transcripts for all-lowercase entries (capitalisation missing).
- [ ] Re-train KenLM with high-quality punctuated text.
- [ ] Evaluate CER on non-normalized test sets.

### 7. Number Normalisation & UNK Token Fix - DONE
- [x] Replace en-dash `–` and em-dash `—` with ASCII hyphen `-` in all training manifests (85 train + 70 TTS entries fixed).
- [x] Use Gemini 2.5 Flash to normalise written-out Finnish numbers to digit form (2,586 API calls across train + TTS).
- [ ] Re-evaluate on the 5-sample number test set after Round 2 training to verify consistency.

### 8. Long-Form Data Expansion - DONE
- [x] Download `RASMUS/canary_asr_finetune_tts_long_data` (4.8 GB zip, 6,365 entries, mean 16.4s).
- [x] Align TTS manifest to NeMo training format and integrate into combined training manifest.
- [x] Round 2 training configured and ready to launch (see Round 2 section below).
- [ ] Benchmark Round 2 model against Round 1 and finetuned Whisper on `moo.wav`.

---

## 🛠️ NeMo Environment Setup

This section documents the exact steps to set up a working NeMo inference/training environment, including the fixes required for the `nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:25.01-py3` container.

### Installation (from scratch on pytorch:25.01-py3 base image)

```bash

# 1. Clone the HF model repo (contains NeMo source with patches applied)

#    Skip LFS to avoid downloading the 3.6 GB model during clone

GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone \

  "https://user:${HF_TOKEN}@huggingface.co/RASMUS/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2" \

  /workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2



# 2. Install NeMo in editable mode from the patched source

cd /workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/NeMo

pip install -e ".[asr]"



# 3. Install pinned dependencies

pip install 'fsspec==2024.12.0' 'numpy<2.0' 'librosa>=0.11.0' kaldialign wandb

```

### Required Compatibility Fixes

The pytorch:25.01-py3 container ships with packages that conflict with NeMo 2.8.0rc0:

```bash

# Fix 1: Downgrade lightning to the version NeMo requires (<=2.4.0)

# The container ships lightning 2.4.0 but pip may upgrade it — pin it back.

pip install "lightning==2.4.0" "pytorch-lightning==2.4.0"



# Fix 2: Remove incompatible torchvision

# The container's torchvision (0.20.0a0) was built against torch 2.6.0a0 (the original

# container torch), but NeMo's install upgrades torch to ~2.10. torchvision then fails

# on import and blocks NeMo. ASR does not need torchvision.

pip uninstall -y torchvision

```

### Downloading the Finetuned Model

```bash

# Download the finetuned acoustic model (3.6 GB)

curl -L \

  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HF_TOKEN}" \

  "https://huggingface.co/RASMUS/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/resolve/main/canary-finnish.nemo" \

  -o /workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/canary-finnish.nemo



# KenLM models are also LFS — download the 5M variant (best WER):

curl -L \

  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HF_TOKEN}" \

  "https://huggingface.co/RASMUS/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/resolve/main/kenlm_5M.nemo" \

  -o /workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/kenlm_5M.nemo

```

### Quick Inference Smoke Test

```python

import warnings; warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')

from nemo.collections.asr.models import EncDecMultiTaskModel



model = EncDecMultiTaskModel.restore_from(

    '/workspace/Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2/canary-finnish.nemo',

    map_location='cuda'

)

model.eval()



results = model.transcribe(

    audio=['path/to/audio.wav'],

    task='asr', source_lang='fi', target_lang='fi', pnc='yes'

)

print(results[0].text)

```

### Loading the Base Model (for comparison)

```python

# Downloads ~3.6 GB on first run, cached in ~/.cache/huggingface/

model_base = EncDecMultiTaskModel.from_pretrained("nvidia/canary-1b-v2", map_location='cuda')

```

---

## 📝 Progress Log
- **2026-01-11:** Initial project setup.
- **2026-02-08:** Redesigned data pipeline for 4 real datasets (CSS10, FLEURS, VoxPopuli, Common Voice).
- **2026-02-10:** **Finetuning complete.** Epoch 11 reached `val_wer=0.1258` on FLEURS.
- **2026-02-13:** Mermaid diagrams and project documentation for DS team.
- **2026-02-18:** **KenLM benchmarks finished.** Consolidated repository structure. Applied NeMo patches for inference stability.
- **2026-02-20:** **Model Released.** Release of `Finnish-ASR-Canary-v2` on HF. Implemented VAD-based inference pipeline. Currently tuning for long-form stability on `moo.wav` with various `alpha` settings (0.0 - 0.4 tested).
- **2026-02-26:** **Root-cause analysis complete.** Investigated long-form gap vs. Whisper and number handling. Key findings: (1) 77% of training data is <10s, creating distribution shift at inference chunk lengths; (2) No cross-chunk context in Canary's AED architecture; (3) Only 2.5% of training samples contain digit characters — numbers are a known weak point; (4) 28 corrupted Common Voice entries found (TSV metadata in text field); (5) `moo.wav` test file confirmed as 30 minutes. Action plan: shorten chunk_len, add chunk overlap, fix data corruption, and plan a long-form training data expansion round.

- **2026-02-26:** **Live number inference + tokenizer audit completed.** Ran base Canary-v2 vs. finetuned model on 5 FLEURS samples. Confirmed: (1) base model always outputs digits (`100`, `17`); (2) finetuned model regressed to mixed output — sometimes written words, sometimes digits — due to inconsistent training transcripts; (3) en-dash (`–`) produces UNK token `⁇` in finetuned model, base model degrades gracefully to ASCII hyphen. Policy decision: **standardise on digit output** and fix en-dash encoding in training manifests before next training run. NeMo environment setup documented (with fixes for `torchvision` and `lightning` version conflicts). TTS long-form dataset (`canary_asr_finetune_tts_long_data`, 8GB, mean 16.5s/segment) identified as key data source for next training run. Action plan for next run: (1) normalise numbers to digits via Gemini Flash API, (2) fix en-dash → ASCII hyphen, (3) fix 28 corrupted CV entries, (4) add TTS long-form data.
- **2026-03-01:** **Round 2 data pipeline complete.** Ran `normalize_manifests.py`: 2,586 Gemini 2.5 Flash API calls (~$0.62), 1,137 number changes in train + 888 in TTS, 85 en-dash and 28 corrupted CV entries fixed. Downloaded and extracted TTS long-form dataset (6,365 entries, 4.8 GB). Split TTS data into train (4,377), eval_tts (487, mean 14.5s), and long-form pool (1,501 entries >20s). Sampled 200 entries into `eval_long_form.jsonl` (seed 42) and returned 1,301 to training, yielding `train_manifest_combined.jsonl` (28,858 entries, 75.6h). Round 2 training config created (`configs/canary_finetune_finnish_v2.yaml`). **Training ready to launch.**
- **2026-03-01:** **Training crash diagnosed and fixed.** Round 2 training ran 505 steps then crashed with CUDA `vectorized_gather_kernel index out of bounds`. Root cause: entry 14857 in `train_manifest_combined.jsonl` contained 11,247 chars of Python code (Gemini normalization returned a code block instead of a transcript for `voxpopuli_005371.wav`). When tokenized with the canary2 prompt format, the sequence far exceeded the decoder's `max_sequence_length=1024`, causing position-embedding OOB. Additionally, 4 entries in `eval_common_voice.json` had TSV metadata contamination (same v1 issue, not previously caught in the v2 eval set). Both manifests fixed. Config rewritten from full-architecture spec to minimal v1-style format (`tokenizer: update_tokenizer: false`) using `speech_to_text_finetune.py` (which restores the full model from the `.nemo` file). Training re-launched. Manifests synced to `canary-finnish-asr-data` HuggingFace dataset repo.