whisper-large-v3-turbo-audio-captioner

Whisper Large v3 Turbo - Audio Captioner (Intermediate Checkpoint)#

This is an intermediate checkpoint and is NOT fully trained. It is released to enable further fine-tuning, experimentation, and community collaboration. Expect imperfect outputs, especially on non-speech environmental sounds.

Model Description#

This model is a fine-tuned version of openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo (809M parameters) trained for audio captioning — generating natural language descriptions of audio content rather than transcription.

• Architecture: Whisper encoder-decoder (32 encoder layers, 4 decoder layers, d_model=1280)
• Parameters: 809M total (663M encoder, 172M decoder) — all parameters were trained (nothing frozen)
• Precision: BF16
• Max audio length: 30 seconds
• Max caption length: 448 tokens

Training#

Datasets (~3.1M audio-caption pairs)#

Training Phases#

The model was trained across multiple phases. This checkpoint is from the final phase:

Training Details#

• Hardware: 8x NVIDIA H100 80GB GPUs
• Effective batch size: 64 (8 GPUs x 8 per-device)
• Optimizer: AdamW (weight decay 0.0)
• Gradient norm clipping: 1.0
• Throughput: ~127 samples/second
• Phase 6 duration: ~21.5 hours
• Framework: Hugging Face Transformers 4.57.6 with Seq2SeqTrainer

Metrics#

• Best validation loss: 0.7498 (step 143,797)
• Final training loss: 0.34
• Total samples seen (all phases): ~19M+

Known Limitations#

• Environmental sounds: Captions for non-speech audio (environmental sounds, sound effects) can hallucinate or produce incorrect descriptions. Speech and music captioning tends to be more reliable.
• Not converged: This is an intermediate checkpoint. Further training with more data and careful data balancing is expected to improve quality significantly.
• Whisper encoder bias: The Whisper encoder was pre-trained on speech, so it has a natural bias toward speech-like features.

Usage#

Quick Inference#

import torch
from transformers import WhisperForConditionalGeneration, WhisperProcessor

model_id = "laion/whisper-large-v3-turbo-audio-captioner"

processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(
    model_id, torch_dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto"
)

# Load your audio (16kHz mono)
import librosa
audio, sr = librosa.load("your_audio.wav", sr=16000)

# Process
input_features = processor(audio, sampling_rate=16000, return_tensors="pt").input_features
input_features = input_features.to(model.device, dtype=torch.float16)

# Generate caption
with torch.no_grad():
    predicted_ids = model.generate(
        input_features,
        max_new_tokens=448,
        language="en",
        task="transcribe",
    )

caption = processor.batch_decode(predicted_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]
print(caption)

Continue Training#

The repository includes the full training code used to produce this checkpoint:

• train.py — Main training script (Seq2SeqTrainer-based, supports streaming and local data)
• prefetcher.py — Resilient tar streaming with prefetching for webdataset-style data
• monitor.py — HTTP dashboard for real-time training monitoring (loss curves, eval samples, throughput)
• watchdog.sh — Auto-restart wrapper for training robustness

To continue training:

# Install dependencies
pip install transformers datasets torch librosa soundfile safetensors accelerate

# Set environment variables and launch
WHISPER_STREAM=1 \
WHISPER_RESUME_FROM=./best \
WHISPER_LR=5e-5 \
WHISPER_LR_SCHEDULE=linear \
WHISPER_WARMUP_RATIO=0.05 \
WHISPER_WEIGHTS_ONLY_RESUME=1 \
torchrun --nproc_per_node=8 train.py

Key environment variables:

• WHISPER_RESUME_FROM — Path to checkpoint directory to resume from
• WHISPER_LR — Peak learning rate (default: 5e-4)
• WHISPER_LR_SCHEDULE — linear or cosine (default: cosine)
• WHISPER_MAX_STEPS — Override total training steps
• WHISPER_EPOCHS — Number of epochs (default: 1)
• WHISPER_WARMUP_RATIO — Warmup fraction (default: 0.05)
• WHISPER_WEIGHTS_ONLY_RESUME — Set to 1 to load only weights (fresh optimizer/scheduler)
• WHISPER_PER_DEVICE_BATCH — Per-GPU batch size (default: 8)

Citation#

If you use this model, please cite:

@misc{laion-whisper-audio-captioner-2026,
  title={Whisper Large v3 Turbo Audio Captioner},
  author={LAION},
  year={2026},
  url={https://huggingface.co/laion/whisper-large-v3-turbo-audio-captioner}
}

License#

Apache 2.0