SimPOTrans: Self-Adaptation for Offline-to-Simultaneous Speech Translation via Reinforcement Learning
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2504.11809v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) produces translations incrementally while processing partial speech input. Although large language models...
arXiv:2509.21932v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How to make human-interpreter-like read/write decisions for simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems? Current state-of-the-art systems for...
The paper presents a method for improving simultaneous speech translation by adapting a full‑utterance speech language model with prefix supervision derived from its own complete and partial waveform translations, eliminating the need for transcripts or human translations. Experiments on FLEURS and CoVoST2 across three language directions show that prefix training enhances quality–latency trade‑offs, especially when combined with multi‑turn append‑only decoding, and that a confidence threshold effectively controls the inference‑time quality–latency balance. The study also explores the impact of synthesis margin on translation quality and calibration, finding a non‑monotonic relationship with latency.
The paper introduces a method called randomized intermediate guidance for training tandem speech-to-speech models, where a large language model (LLM) acts as a backend providing candidate responses while the user is speaking. Instead of simulating the backend’s guidance, the approach derives guidance directly from the conversation corpus, using target responses for informative guidance and randomly sampled responses to simulate irrelevant updates. Experiments on synthetic dialogues and 3.8k hours of real conversations show that this technique yields response quality comparable to LLM-generated baselines while improving natural turn‑taking and audio‑judge naturalness.
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.
DIAL‑S2ST is a post‑training method that learns to control inference‑time latency in simultaneous speech‑to‑speech translation models. It reuses pretrained translation capabilities through self‑distillation from lookahead predictions and limits large text distillation losses to address the imitation gap, providing supervision for earlier emission without paired target data or reward computation. By jointly training a single LoRA adapter across scales with matched lookahead guidance, the learned timing can be adjusted at inference, and experiments on French‑to‑English translation with Hibiki show that only 10 hours of source speech enable this adaptation, yielding flexible latency control with a favorable quality‑latency trade‑off.