Model reference · open weights
distilhubert is an open-weight embedding model from ntu-spml. distilhubert (FP32) weighs 47 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.
Summary of the ntu-spml/distilhubert model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | ntu-spml |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-03-02 |
| Parameters | 23M |
| VRAM | 47 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Runs | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
DistilHuBERT by NTU Speech Processing & Machine Learning Lab
The base model pretrained on 16kHz sampled speech audio. When using the model make sure that your speech input is also sampled at 16Khz.
Note: This model does not have a tokenizer as it was pretrained on audio alone. In order to use this model speech recognition, a tokenizer should be created and the model should be fine-tuned on labeled text data. Check out this blog for more in-detail explanation of how to fine-tune the model.
Paper: DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT
Authors: Heng-Jui Chang, Shu-wen Yang, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract Self-supervised speech representation learning methods like wav2vec 2.0 and Hidden-unit BERT (HuBERT) leverage unlabeled speech data for pre-training and offer good representations for numerous speech processing tasks. Despite the success of these methods, they require large memory and high pre-training costs, making them inaccessible for researchers in academia and small companies. Therefore, this paper introduces DistilHuBERT, a novel multi-task learning framework to distill hidden representations from a HuBERT model directly. This method reduces HuBERT's size by 75% and 73% faster while retaining most performance in ten different tasks. Moreover, DistilHuBERT required little training time and data, opening the possibilities of pre-training personal and on-device SSL models for speech.
The original model can be found under https://github.com/s3prl/s3prl/tree/master/s3prl/upstream/distiller .
See this blog for more information on how to fine-tune the model. Note that the class Wav2Vec2ForCTC has to be replaced by HubertForCTC.
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.