TDT beam search fails above ~40-90s of audio: "zero-duration expansion did not reduce score" (greedy on the same audio is fine)

parakeet_capi_transcribe_pcm_nbest_json aborts on longer inputs with

tdt_beam_search: zero-duration expansion did not reduce score

while greedy decoding of the same audio with the same model succeeds. It reads like an internal invariant that long inputs violate, rather than a bad-input case.

Environment

• parakeet.cpp v0.5.0, released lib-macos-metal-arm64 bundle (ABI 6)
• macOS arm64, Metal backend
• Model: mudler/parakeet-cpp-gguf → tdt-0.6b-v3-q4_k.gguf
• Audio: 16 kHz mono float PCM, AMI meeting recordings (~100s each)

What fails

22 of 23 AMI clips (~100s each) fail. One succeeded, and only at beam 4.

It is not a beam-width interaction — beam 1 fails identically to beam 8:

beam_size=1  FAIL   beam_size=2  FAIL   beam_size=4  FAIL   beam_size=8  FAIL

What succeeds on the identical audio

• parakeet_capi_transcribe_pcm (greedy) — 242 words, no error
• parakeet_capi_transcribe_pcm_batch_json (greedy + timestamps) — 242 words, 242 word records
• The same N-best call on the first 30s or 40s of that same file

So the encoder, the model and the audio are all fine; it is specific to the beam search path at length.

Threshold varies with content, not a fixed limit

Truncating each file to N seconds and decoding at beam 4:

All three pass at 30s and 40s and fail before 100s, at different points — consistent with something accumulating over frames rather than a hard cap.

Possibly model-specific

The same 100.6s clip decodes fine at beam 2, 4 and 8 with tdt_ctc-1.1b-q4_k.gguf. Only tdt-0.6b-v3 failed here, so it may be an interaction between that checkpoint's duration predictions and the expansion check.

Minimal reproduction

# ctypes against libparakeet.dylib from the v0.5.0 release
ptr = lib.parakeet_capi_transcribe_pcm_nbest_json(
    ctx, samples_p, len(samples), 16000, 4, 1, 1, None)
# ptr is NULL; parakeet_capi_last_error(ctx) reports the message above.
# Truncating `samples` to 40s makes the same call succeed.

Possibly related to #55 (error above 5 min), though the threshold here is far lower and the message differs.

Not blocking for us — we moved to transcribe_pcm_batch_json, which gives greedy output with per-word timestamps and no beam search. Reporting because the failure is silent-until-it-isn't for anyone relying on N-best over long audio.

Reproduce the failure through parakeet_capi_transcribe_pcm_nbest_json using the supplied 16 kHz mono PCM case, then compare it with the greedy entry points and truncated audio. Trace the TDT beam-search path around the reported “zero-duration expansion did not reduce score” invariant and the behavior of the tdt-0.6b-v3 model. Done means long-input N-best decoding no longer aborts while existing greedy and shorter-input behavior remains intact.