---
datasets:
- FBK-MT/mosel
- facebook/covost2
- openslr/librispeech_asr
- facebook/voxpopuli
language:
- en
- it
license: cc-by-4.0
metrics:
- wer
tags:
- speech
- speech recognition
- ASR
pipeline_tag: automatic-speech-recognition
library_name: transformers
---

# FAMA-small-asr
<div>
  <img src="FAMA.png" width="100%"  alt="FAMA" />
</div>

## Table of Contents
1. [Overview](#overview)
2. [Usage](#Usage)
3. [Results](#Results)
4. [License](#license)
5. [Citation](#citation)

## Overview

FAMA is the first family of large-scale open-science SFMs for English and
Italian trained on [over 150k hours of exclusively open-source(OS)-compliant speech data](https://huggingface.co/datasets/FBK-MT/fama-data). 

FAMA models achieve [remarkable results](#results), with ASR and ST improvements on average across languages compared to OWSM, 
and is competitive in terms of ASR performance with the Whisper model family while being up to 8 times faster.

All the artifacts used for realizing FAMA models, including codebase, datasets, and models
themself are [released under OS-compliant licenses](#license), promoting a more
responsible creation of models in our community.

It is available in 2 sizes, with 2 variants for ASR only:

- [FAMA-small](https://huggingface.co/FBK-MT/fama-small) - 475 million parameters
- [FAMA-medium](https://huggingface.co/FBK-MT/fama-medium) - 878 million parameters
- [FAMA-small-asr](https://huggingface.co/FBK-MT/fama-small-asr) - 475 million parameters
- [FAMA-medium-asr](https://huggingface.co/FBK-MT/fama-medium-asr) - 878 million parameters

For further details, please refer to the paper [FAMA: The First Large-Scale Open-Science Speech Foundation Model for English and Italian](https://huggingface.co/papers/2505.22759).
The code is available in the [Github repository](https://github.com/hlt-mt/FBK-fairseq).

## Usage

FAMA models are supported in Hugging Face 🤗 Transformers. 
To run the model, first install the Transformers and Datasets libraries. 

```sh
pip install transformers==4.48.1 datasets
```

To perform a single inference on a sample audio file using the 
[`pipeline`](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main_classes/pipelines#transformers.AutomaticSpeechRecognitionPipeline) 
class, run:

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoProcessor, pipeline
from datasets import load_dataset

model_id = "FBK-MT/fama-small-asr"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)

device = "cuda:0" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
tgt_lang = "en"

# Force the model to start with the language tag
lang_tag = "<lang:{}>".format(tgt_lang)
lang_tag_id = processor.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids(lang_tag)

generate_kwargs = {"num_beams": 5, "no_repeat_ngram_size": 5, "forced_bos_token_id": lang_tag_id}

pipe = pipeline(
    "automatic-speech-recognition",
    model=model_id,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    torch_dtype=torch.float32,
    device=device,
    return_timestamps=False,
    generate_kwargs=generate_kwargs
)

dataset = load_dataset("distil-whisper/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
sample = dataset[0]["audio"]

result = pipe(sample)
print(result["text"])
```

Where `tgt_lang` is the target language (either `en` or `it`). The source languages has not to be specified.
To run the inference on a local audio file `audio.wav`, call the pipeline with:

```python
result = pipe("audio.wav")
```

To perform a batch inference with size `batch_size`, run:

```python
result = pipe(["audio_1.wav", "audio_2.wav"], batch_size=2)
```

For the inference, we suggest converting the audio files in wav format with 16kHz sampling rate and 1 channel.

## Results

We evaluate FAMA-ASR on ASR using popular open-source datasets such as CommonVoice, Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS), and VoxPopuli.
The metric used is WER (↓).

We also benchmark FAMA in terms of computational time and maximum batch size supported on HuggingFace against Whisper and SeamlessM4T models. The metric used is the inverse real time factor (xRTF).

**Key highlights:**
- FAMA achieves up to 4.2 WER improvement on average across languages compared to OWSM v3.1
- FAMA is up to 8 times faster than Whisper large-v3 while achieving comparable performance

### Automatic Speech Recogniton (ASR)
| ***Model/Dataset WER (↓)***             | **CommonVoice**-*en* | **CommonVoice**-*it* | **MLS**-*en* | **MLS**-*it* | **VoxPopuli**-*en* | **VoxPopuli**-*it* | **AVG**-*en* | **AVG**-*it* |
|-----------------------------------------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|----------|---------|----------|
| Whisper *medium*                        | 14.5    | 10.4    | 14.2    | 15.9    | 8.1     | 26.8     | 12.3    | 17.7     |
| Whisper *large-v3*                      | 11.2    | 6.5     | **5.0** | 8.8     | 7.1     | 18.8     | 7.8     | 11.4     | 
| OWSM v3.1 *medium*                      | 11.9    | 12.5    | 6.6     | 19.3    | 8.4     | 24.0     | 9.0     | 18.6     |
| SeamlessM4T *medium*                    | 10.7    | 7.8     | 8.8     | 11.3    | 10.2    | 18.2     | 9.9     | 12.4     | 
| SeamlessM4T *v2-large*                  | **7.7** | **5.0** | 6.4     | **8.5** | **6.9** | 16.6     | **7.0** | **10.0** | 
| FAMA-ASR *small*                        | 13.8    | 8.9     | 5.8     | 12.6    | 7.2     | 15.7     | 8.9     | 12.4     |
| FAMA-ASR *medium*                       | 11.7    | 7.1     | 5.1     | 12.2    | 7.0     | 15.9     | 7.9     | 11.7     |
| FAMA *small*                            | 13.7    | 8.6     | 5.8     | 12.8    | 7.3     | **15.6** | 8.9     | 12.3     | 
| FAMA *medium*                           | 11.5    | 7.0     | 5.2     | 13.9    | 7.2     | 15.9     | 8.0     | 12.3     |

### Computational Time and Maximum Batch Size

| ***Model***            | ***Batch Size*** | ***xRTF en (↑)*** | ***xRTF it (↑)*** | ***xRTF AVG (↑)*** |
|------------------------|------------|-------------|-------------|--------------|
| Whisper *medium*       | 8          | 13.3        | 10.9        | 12.1         |
| Whisper *large-v3*     | 4          | 7.9         | 6.5         | 7.2          |
| SeamlessM4T *medium*   | 2          | 28.5        | 26.2        | 27.4         |
| SeamlessM4T *v2-large* | 2          | 13.7        | 13.3        | 13.5         |
| FAMA *small*           | 16         | **57.4**    | **56.0**    | **56.7**     |
| FAMA *medium*          | 8          | 39.5        | 41.2        | 40.4         |

## License

We release the FAMA model weights, and training data under the CC-BY 4.0 license. 
The training data can be found in [FAMA Training Data](https://huggingface.co/datasets/FBK-MT/fama-data).
The [original FBK-fairseq codebase](https://github.com/hlt-mt/FBK-fairseq) used to train the model is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

## Citation

If you use FAMA in your work, please cite:

```
@misc{papi2025fama,
      title={FAMA: The First Large-Scale Open-Science Speech Foundation Model for English and Italian}, 
      author={Sara Papi and Marco Gaido and Luisa Bentivogli and Alessio Brutti and Mauro Cettolo and Roberto Gretter and Marco Matassoni and Mohamed Nabih and Matteo Negri},
      year={2025}
}
```