Qwen3-ASR-0.6B — INT4 AWQ + Quantization-Aware Distillation

This is a compressed and distillation-refined version of Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B.
The model applies INT4 AWQ (Activation-aware Weight Quantization) post-training quantization followed by Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD) to recover accuracy lost during aggressive 4-bit compression — while preserving low-latency, low-memory inference.

---

Method Overview

Stage 1 — INT4 AWQ (PTQ)

The base FP16 model is quantized to INT4 using the AWQ (awq_full) algorithm via NVIDIA ModelOpt. To preserve acoustic feature extraction and final token prediction integrity, the audio_tower and lm_head are explicitly excluded from quantization and kept in FP16. Calibration was performed dynamically across English, Chinese, and 28 other languages to ensure a balanced quantization scale mapping.

Stage 2 — Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD)

To close the accuracy gap introduced by heavy 4-bit quantization, we apply a knowledge distillation fine-tuning stage where:

• Teacher: Qwen3-ASR-1.7B FP16 model (frozen)
• Student: the INT4-quantized 0.6B model (trainable QKV/MLP quantized weights — audio encoder and LM head are frozen)
• Data: unlabeled speech data spanning 30 languages, with pseudo-labels generated by the 1.7B teacher model
• Loss: a combination of KL-divergence distillation loss (alpha_kd = 0.5) and cross-entropy loss
• Optimizer: AdamW with cosine decay learning rate schedule

---

Benchmark Results (Trilingual Evaluation)

QAD successfully recovers ~1.53% absolute WER in Vietnamese and stabilizes English/Chinese performance against aggressive 4-bit compression degradation, with no additional labeled data required.

---

Usage

Install dependencies:

pip install qwen-asr nvidia-modelopt soundfile numpy

Run inference:

import soundfile as sf
import numpy as np
import torch
import modelopt.torch.opt as mto
from qwen_asr import Qwen3ASRModel

# Enable ModelOpt quantization state restore
mto.enable_huggingface_checkpointing()

model = Qwen3ASRModel.from_pretrained(
    "vrfai/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-int4-QAD",
    dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="cuda:0",
    max_new_tokens=256,
)

audio, sr = sf.read("your_audio.wav")
if audio.ndim > 1:
    audio = audio.mean(axis=1)
audio = audio.astype(np.float32)

results = model.transcribe(audio=(audio, sr), language=None)
print(results[0].text)

---

Model Details

---

Citation

If you use this model, please also cite the original Qwen3-ASR work:

@misc{qwen3asr2025,
  title  = {Qwen3-ASR},
  author = {Qwen Team},
  year   = {2025},
  url    = {[https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B)}
}

---

Acknowledgements

• Qwen Team for the base ASR model
• NVIDIA ModelOpt for quantization tooling

Quantization Script

The recipes and scripts used to quantize this model can be found in the following repository:

• VinRobotics/model-quantization-recipes