2026
BaldWhisper: Faster Whisper with Head Shearing and Layer Merging
ICASSP 2026poster
Pruning large pre-trained transformers in a data-scarce scenario is challenging, as it often requires massive retraining data to recover performance. For instance, Distill-Whisper prunes Whisper by 40 and retrains on 21,000 hours of speech, far beyond what is available for most languages. Can Whispe…