Online nnet3 decoder path resolution failure in production environments

The Kaldi online nnet3 decoder relies heavily on relative paths for referencing the acoustic model, final.mdl, and HCLG.fst. While these configurations function correctly when the process is executed from the local experiment or repository root, they frequently fail in production deployments where the working directory is dynamic or restricted.

The toolkit does not perform pre-validation of these paths at initialization; instead, file-not-found errors only surface during the first decoding attempt. Additionally, the reliance on the KALDI_ROOT environment variable for script execution in steps/nnet3/online_decode.sh creates inconsistent behavior if the production environment is not perfectly mirrored.

• What is the recommended method for enforcing absolute path resolution within the decoder configuration to ensure portability across different file-system structures?
• How can one ensure memory-mapping of large FSTs succeeds when production environments utilize strict read-only filesystem mounts?