One of the major drawbacks of SCRF models is their high computational cost. In our experiments, the CTC model is around 3–4 times faster than the SRNN model that uses the same RNN encoder. To cut down the computational cost, we investigated if CTC can be used to pretrain the RNN encoder to speed up the training of the joint model. Figure 2 shows the convergence curves of the joint model with and without CTC pretraining, and we see pretraining indeed improves the convergence speed of the joint model. 
 Question: Can SCRF be used to pretrain the model?
No