Whisper-MLA: Reducing GPU Memory Consumption of ASR Models based on MHA2MLA Conversion
The Transformer-based Whisper model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, its Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism results in significant GPU memory consumption due to the linearly growing Key-Value (KV) cache usage, which is problematic for many applications especially with long-form audio. To address this, we introduce Whisper-MLA, a novel architecture that incorporates Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) into the Whisper model. Specifically, we adapt MLA for Whisper's absolute positional embeddings and systematically investigate its application across encoder self-attention, decoder self-attention, and cross-attention modules. Empirical...
| Authors | Sen Zhang, Jianguo Wei, Wenhuan Lu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 28 February 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 February 2026 |
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