Your question is CTC Loss and Alignment. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
Explain the formulation of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and how it handles alignment between audio frames and text tokens.
Describe the blank symbol, valid alignment paths, the collapse function, and the forward-backward computation used to obtain the marginal likelihood. Include a practical PyTorch implementation or pseudocode, and discuss assumptions, numerical stability, repeated tokens, sequence-length constraints, and suitable evaluation metrics.