Model reference · open weights

distilhubert

Embeddings ntu-spml Embeddings 1 build Open weights 57k dl/mo

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.

  • DistilHuBERT is a feature-extraction model developed by ntu-spml for processing 16kHz sampled speech audio.
  • It contains 23M parameters and is designed for English language tasks.
  • The model is released under the apache-2.0 licence.

Summary of the ntu-spml/distilhubert model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byntu-spml
Released2022-03-02
Parameters23M
VRAM47 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for distilhubert (FP32)

47 MBweights, file size
1.1 GBruntime overhead
CardRunsMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What ntu-spml says about distilhubert

Read 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 .

Usage

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.

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