Translatotron-V(ison): An End-to-End Model for In-Image Machine Translation

Zhibin Lan, Liqiang Niu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su


Abstract
In-image machine translation (IIMT) aims to translate an image containing texts in source language into an image containing translations in target language. In this regard, conventional cascaded methods suffer from issues such as error propagation, massive parameters, and difficulties in deployment and retaining visual characteristics of the input image.Thus, constructing end-to-end models has become an option, which, however, faces two main challenges: 1) the huge modeling burden, as it is required to simultaneously learn alignment across languages and preserve the visual characteristics of the input image; 2) the difficulties of directly predicting excessively lengthy pixel sequences.In this paper, we propose Translatotron-V(ision), an end-to-end IIMT model consisting of four modules. In addition to an image encoder, and an image decoder, our model contains a target text decoder and an image tokenizer. Among them, the target text decoder is used to alleviate the language alignment burden, and the image tokenizer converts long sequences of pixels into shorter sequences of visual tokens, preventing the model from focusing on low-level visual features. Besides, we present a two-stage training framework for our model to assist the model in learning alignment across modalities and languages. Finally, we propose a location-aware evaluation metric called Structure-BLEU to assess the translation quality of the generated images. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance compared to cascaded models with only 70.9% of parameters, and significantly outperforms the pixel-level end-to-end IIMT model.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.325
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5472–5485
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.325
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhibin Lan, Liqiang Niu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Min Zhang, and Jinsong Su. 2024. Translatotron-V(ison): An End-to-End Model for In-Image Machine Translation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 5472–5485, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Translatotron-V(ison): An End-to-End Model for In-Image Machine Translation (Lan et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.325.pdf