the.com/conformer
The model that stopped choosing between hearing like a human and thinking like a robot.
means A person (or system) that bends itself to fit the expected shape, going along with the group or the standard rather than standing apart.
from Built from the Latin conformare — 'to shape together,' from com- ('with') plus formare ('to form'), itself from forma ('shape'). The -er simply marks the doer: one who shapes themselves to match. English picked up 'conform' in the 14th-15th century for matching a pattern or rule, and 'conformer' followed as the noun for anyone — or anything — that does the matching rather than the shaping.
- architecture
- convolution plus self-attention in one block, not either
- origin
- built by Google for speech recognition in 2020
- local vs global
- convolution catches nearby sounds, attention catches far ones
- legacy
- became the backbone of Whisper-style ASR systems