with any pretrained speech autoencoding model as the encoder (*e.g.* [Wav2Vec2](wav2vec2), [Hubert](hubert)) and any pretrained autoregressive model as the decoder.
The effectiveness of initializing speech-sequence-to-text-sequence models with pretrained checkpoints for speech
recognition and speech translation has *e.g.* been shown in [Large-Scale Self- and Semi-Supervised Learning for Speech
Translation](https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06678) by Changhan Wang, Anne Wu, Juan Pino, Alexei Baevski, Michael Auli,
## Randomly initializing `SpeechEncoderDecoderModel` from model configurations.
[`SpeechEncoderDecoderModel`] can be randomly initialized from an encoder and a decoder config. In the following example, we show how to do this using the default [`Wav2Vec2Model`] configuration for the encoder
and the default [`BertForCausalLM`] configuration for the decoder.
```python
>>> from transformers import BertConfig, Wav2Vec2Config, SpeechEncoderDecoderConfig, SpeechEncoderDecoderModel
>>> model = SpeechEncoderDecoderModel(config=config)
```
## Initialising `SpeechEncoderDecoderModel` from a pretrained encoder and a pretrained decoder.
[`SpeechEncoderDecoderModel`] can be initialized from a pretrained encoder checkpoint and a pretrained decoder checkpoint. Note that any pretrained Transformer-based speech model, *e.g.* [Wav2Vec2](wav2vec2), [Hubert](hubert) can serve as the encoder and both pretrained auto-encoding models, *e.g.* BERT, pretrained causal language models, *e.g.* GPT2, as well as the pretrained decoder part of sequence-to-sequence models, *e.g.* decoder of BART, can be used as the decoder.
Depending on which architecture you choose as the decoder, the cross-attention layers might be randomly initialized.
Initializing [`SpeechEncoderDecoderModel`] from a pretrained encoder and decoder checkpoint requires the model to be fine-tuned on a downstream task, as has been shown in [the *Warm-starting-encoder-decoder blog post*](https://huggingface.co/blog/warm-starting-encoder-decoder).
To do so, the `SpeechEncoderDecoderModel` class provides a [`SpeechEncoderDecoderModel.from_encoder_decoder_pretrained`] method.
```python
>>> from transformers import SpeechEncoderDecoderModel
>>> model = SpeechEncoderDecoderModel.from_encoder_decoder_pretrained(
## Loading an existing `SpeechEncoderDecoderModel` checkpoint and perform inference.
To load fine-tuned checkpoints of the `SpeechEncoderDecoderModel` class, [`SpeechEncoderDecoderModel`] provides the `from_pretrained(...)` method just like any other model architecture in Transformers.
To perform inference, one uses the [`generate`] method, which allows to autoregressively generate text. This method supports various forms of decoding, such as greedy, beam search and multinomial sampling.
```python
>>> from transformers import Wav2Vec2Processor, SpeechEncoderDecoderModel
>>> from datasets import load_dataset
>>> import torch
>>> # load a fine-tuned speech translation model and corresponding processor
>>> model = SpeechEncoderDecoderModel.from_pretrained("facebook/wav2vec2-xls-r-300m-en-to-15")