arXiv Computation and Language

Transcribe, Translate, and Optimize: Joint Reward Learning for Speech Translation

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Training-Free Pronunciation Transcription via Text-Constrained Acoustic Rescoring

The paper introduces a training‑free speech‑and‑text‑to‑pronunciation (ST2P) pipeline that combines lexical candidates from G2P tools with acoustic rescoring using frozen pretrained S2P models. By performing a left‑to‑right greedy search over whole‑sequence negative log‑likelihoods, the method achieves a dramatic reduction in character error rate on Japanese corpora, outperforming both baseline G2P/S2P approaches and commercial multimodal LLMs. The approach is also significantly faster—3–3.5× faster than beam search and twice as fast as direct decoding—while maintaining high accuracy across multiple languages.

By Hikaru Asano, Yotaro Kubo, So Kuroki
arXiv AI
Jun 9

End-to-End Training for Discrete Token LLM based TTS System

arXiv:2606. 09234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-speech (TTS) systems typically adopt a cascaded pipeline consisting of a speech tokenizer, an autoregressive large language model (LLM), and a diffusion based flow-matching (FM) model, with these components trained independently.

By Changfeng Gao, Yong Ren, Jun Yuan, Ye Bai, Zhao You, ShiDong Shang
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Balancing Global Quality and Pronoun-Specific Feedback for Context-Aware Machine Translation

The paper introduces ProNMT, a reward-guided iterative self‑training approach that balances global translation quality with pronoun‑specific feedback for context‑aware machine translation. ProNMT samples candidate translations, scores them using reference‑free quality estimation and a pronoun label derived from references, and fine‑tunes on the highest‑scoring candidate. Experiments on English–German Europarl and English–French News Commentary show that ProNMT outperforms standard context‑aware fine‑tuning on BLEU and COMET, while ablations reveal that pronoun‑only feedback can harm overall quality and that confidence‑weighted feedback outperforms hard binary feedback.

By Harshit Dhankhar, Baban Gain, Asif Ekbal, Yogesh Mani Tripathi
arXiv AI
Jun 9

LEAF: Growing Trees Without Branching for Speech-Aware Large Language Model Post-Training

arXiv:2606. 07610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State-of-the-art GRPO-style methods for speech-aware large language model post-training suffer from coarse credit assignment, broadcasting the same terminal-reward advantage to every token in a response.

By Argyrios Gerogiannis, Yekaterina Yegorova, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Venugopal V. Veeravalli
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Dynamic Lagging using Stable-Prefix Training for Simultaneous Translation

The paper introduces a training strategy for cascaded simultaneous speech translation that allows the system to dynamically decide how much of the source prefix to translate. By fine‑tuning a large language model (Qwen3‑8B) on stable prefixes—pairs of source prefixes and the longest shared translation with the full sentence—the authors enable contextual read‑write decisions beyond fixed wait‑k or target‑suffix deletion. Experiments on English‑to‑German, Japanese, and Chinese demonstrate that stable prefixes improve the quality‑latency tradeoff across various test sets.

By Hieu Hoang, Amittai Axelrod, Matt Post
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pre-Training Data Translated Across 36 Languages

arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...

By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Transcript-Supervised Post-Training of Generative Speech Enhancement on Real Recordings via Reinforce Adjoint Matching

The paper adapts Reinforce Adjoint Matching (RAM) to generative speech enhancement, allowing a pretrained model to be post‑trained on real recordings using weak supervision such as text transcripts. RAM shifts the model’s conditional distribution toward higher‑reward outputs by generating enhanced speech on‑policy, evaluating each output with a potentially non‑differentiable reward, and analytically re‑noising the endpoint to create inputs for a reward‑guided regression objective. Experiments on real CHiME‑4 recordings show a 5.08‑percentage‑point reduction in word error rate compared to the pretrained FlowSE model, while maintaining all reported non‑intrusive speech quality metrics and receiving no significant preference in a subjective listening test.

By Julius Richter, Christoph Boeddeker, Yoshiki Masuyama, Kohei Saijo, Dominik Klement, Gordon Wichern, Jonathan Le Roux