The PLUS variant adds two capabilities over the base 4.1-2b:
Punctuated and capitalised transcripts by default — no special
prompt required.
Speaker labels and word-level timestamps in the model's structured
output (full output parsing in CrispASR is the next step; raw text
works today).
Architecturally PLUS is the base 4.1-2b plus a single change: the
encoder's layer-3 hidden state is concatenated with the final layer
output (config: cat_hidden_layers: [3]), producing a 2048-dim
projector input instead of 1024. The Q-Former cross-attention K/V
projection weights are correspondingly (1024, 2048).
Files
File
Quantisation
Size
Notes
granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus-f16.gguf
F16
~5.6 GB
Encoder + projector in F32, LLM weights in F16 — full parity reference
granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus-q4_k.gguf
Q4_K
~2.96 GB
Recommended. LLM layers Q4_K; encoder + projector kept F32 (precision-sensitive). Bit-identical-quality to F16 on encoder + projector
granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus-q4_k-f16enc.gguf
Q4_K + F16 encoder
~2.28 GB
LLM Q4_K, encoder + projector F16 (norms / biases / BN stats stay F32). ~700 MB smaller than the recommended Q4_K with no measurable parity loss on this clip
granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus-q4_k-mini.gguf
Q4_K (aggressive)
~1.66 GB
Encoder, projector and LLM all Q4_K. Smallest / fastest to download. Cosine parity is noticeably worse on PLUS than on the base 4.1 mini because the layer-3 + final hidden-state concat (the architectural delta in PLUS) doubles the surface for Q4_K rounding error. JFK still transcribes correctly with light punctuation drift, but harder material is more likely to regress than on base-4.1 mini. Use Q4_K or Q4_K-f16enc unless disk size is the binding constraint
Cosine parity (vs PyTorch BF16 reference, JFK 11 s clip)
Stage
F16 cos_min
Q4_K cos_min
Q4_K-f16enc cos_min
Q4_K-mini cos_min
mel_spectrogram
0.999997
0.999997
0.999997
0.999997
encoder_out
0.999938
0.999938
0.999938
0.622
projector_out
0.999995
0.999995
0.999995
0.960
encoder_out is the 2048-dim concatenation of the layer-3 hidden state
and the final encoder layer (the PLUS architectural delta). On the
recommended and -f16enc files the encoder weights stay in F32/F16, so
parity is essentially indistinguishable from the F16 reference. On the
-mini file the encoder weights are Q4_K — rounding error compounds
across the 16-layer Conformer and shows up amplified after the concat,
which is why encoder_out cos_min drops to ~0.62 on PLUS where base-4.1
mini sits at ~0.93. End-to-end JFK transcription is still correct.
Tested with crispasr-diff granite-4.1 <model.gguf> <ref.gguf> samples/jfk.wav
Usage with CrispASR
bash
1# auto-download and transcribe2crispasr --backend granite-4.1-plus -m auto samples/audio.wav
34# or with explicit path5crispasr --backend granite-4.1-plus \6 -m granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus-f16.gguf \7 samples/audio.wav
End-to-end example on the JFK 11s clip:
$ crispasr --backend granite-4.1-plus -m auto samples/jfk.wav
And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for
you, ask what you can do for your country.
(Note the punctuation + capitalisation that the base 4.1-2b only
produces with an explicit --ask "transcribe with proper punctuation..." prompt.)
Architecture
Stage
Description
Encoder
16-layer Macaron Conformer (1024 dim, 8 heads, 15-tap depthwise conv). Hidden state at layer 3 is captured and concatenated with the final layer output → 2048-dim projector input.
Projector
2-layer BLIP-2 Q-Former. Cross-attention K/V weights are (1024, 2048) to consume the wider concatenated encoder feature. 3 learned query tokens per 15-frame window.
The same converter handles base / 4.1-2b / 4.1-2b-plus from a single
script — variant detection happens via config.json keys
(cat_hidden_layers, encoder_hidden_size).
Upstream licence:apache-2.0. This repository redistributes under the same terms; it grants no rights the upstream licence does not.
What was done here: format conversion and/or quantisation only (GGUF). No training, no fine-tuning, no merging, no distillation, no change to architecture, vocabulary or capability. Only the numeric representation of the upstream weights differs.
Training data: documented — where it is documented at all — by the upstream provider; see the upstream model card. No training data was used, added or selected by this repository.
Provider status: under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 the upstream authors remain the provider of this model. Converting the serialisation format does not make this repository the provider of a new general-purpose AI model, and no such claim is made. Questions about training content, copyright policy or model capability belong upstream.