Transcribe, Translate, and Optimize: Joint Reward Learning for Speech Translation
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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arXiv:2608. 10812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study reference-free post-training for multilingual machine translation with open large language models.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.