Paper: Confucius4-R2T2: A Stable-Prefix Streaming ASR Model for Real Real-Time Transcription

Streaming speech recognition is increasingly consumed by machines, such as translators and voice agents, that act on each token as it appears. A token that is later revised costs wasted work or a wrong action. In this work, we present Confucius4-R2T2 (short for Real Real-Time Transcription), a stable-prefix streaming ASR model that never modifies its earlier output while maintaining high accuracy and low latency. R2T2 is obtained by post-training Qwen3-ASR-1.7B on 1,500 hours of Chinese and English audio while freezing its pre-trained audio encoder and projector. The adaptation is based on the concept of Longest Stable Prefix (LSP), a new notion that we introduce in this work. We prove that LSP is monotone under the prefix order, consistent with the full-audio output, and maximal among labels that equal a whole earlier output. Learning from LSP labels converts a full-context model into a stable-prefix streaming one without any architectural change. Extensive evaluations show that R2T2 brings streaming recognition close to the base model's full-context quality while delivering stable text with low emission lag. Its gains extend beyond the post-training languages, demonstrating a practical path from full-context ASR to stable streaming. We open-source the model weights and code at https://huggingface.co/netease-youdao/Confucius4-R2T2 and https://github.com/netease-youdao/Confucius4-R2T2.