Streaming speech translation (StreamST) requires determining appropriate timing, known as policy, to generate translations while continuously receiving source speech inputs, balancing low latency with high translation quality. Existing StreamST methods typically operate on sentence-level speech segments, referred to as simultaneous speech translation (SimulST). In practice, they require collaboration with upstream segmentation models to accomplish StreamST, where the truncated speech segments constrain SimulST models to make policy decisions and generate translations based on pre-defined contextual information preset by the upstream models. Moreover, SimulST models struggle to learn effective policies due to the complexity of speech inputs and cross-lingual generation. To address these challenges, we propose StreamUni, which achieves StreamST through a unified Large Speech-Language Model (LSLM). Specifically, StreamUni incorporates speech Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in guiding the LSLM to generate multi-stage outputs. Leveraging these multi-stage outputs, StreamUni simultaneously accomplishes speech segmentation, policy decision, and translation generation. Additionally, we propose a streaming CoT training method that enhances low-latency policy decisions and generation capabilities using limited CoT data. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both SimulST and StreamST tasks.

This system description paper introduces the systems submitted by Xiaomi AI Lab to the three tracks of the IWSLT 2023 Evaluation Campaign, namely the offline speech translation (Offline-ST) track, the offline speech-to-speech translation (Offline-S2ST) track, and the simultaneous speech translation (Simul-ST) track. All our submissions for these three tracks only involve the English-Chinese language direction. Our English-Chinese speech translation systems are constructed using large-scale pre-trained models as the foundation. Specifically, we fine-tune these models’ corresponding components for various downstream speech translation tasks. Moreover, we implement several popular techniques, such as data filtering, data augmentation, speech segmentation, and model ensemble, to improve the system’s overall performance. Extensive experiments show that our systems achieve a significant improvement over the strong baseline systems in terms of the automatic evaluation metric.

This system paper describes the Xiaomi Translation System for the IWSLT 2022 Simultaneous Speech Translation (noted as SST) shared task. We participate in the English-to-Mandarin Chinese Text-to-Text (noted as T2T) track. Our system is built based on the Transformer model with novel techniques borrowed from our recent research work. For the data filtering, language-model-based and rule-based methods are conducted to filter the data to obtain high-quality bilingual parallel corpora. We also strengthen our system with some dominating techniques related to data augmentation, such as knowledge distillation, tagged back-translation, and iterative back-translation. We also incorporate novel training techniques such as R-drop, deep model, and large batch training which have been shown to be beneficial to the naive Transformer model. In the SST scenario, several variations of extttwait-k strategies are explored. Furthermore, in terms of robustness, both data-based and model-based ways are used to reduce the sensitivity of our system to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs. We finally design some inference algorithms and use the adaptive-ensemble method based on multiple model variants to further improve the performance of the system. Compared with strong baselines, fusing all techniques can improve our system by 2 extasciitilde3 BLEU scores under different latency regimes.

This system paper describes the BIT-Xiaomi simultaneous translation system for Autosimtrans 2022 simultaneous translation challenge. We participated in three tracks: the Zh-En text-to-text track, the Zh-En audio-to-text track and the En-Es test-to-text track. In our system, wait-k is employed to train prefix-to-prefix translation models. We integrate streaming chunking to detect boundaries as the source streaming read in. We further improve our system with data selection, data-augmentation and R-drop training methods. Results show that our wait-k implementation outperforms organizer’s baseline by 8 BLEU score at most, and our proposed streaming chunking method further improves about 2 BLEU in low latency regime.

In this paper we introduce our Chinese-English simultaneous translation system participating in AutoSimulTrans2021. In simultaneous translation, translation quality and delay are both important. In order to reduce the translation delay, we cut the streaming-input source sentence into segments and translate the segments before the full sentence is received. In order to obtain high-quality translations, we pre-train a translation model with adequate corpus and fine-tune the model with domain adaptation and sentence length adaptation. The experimental results on the evaluation data show that our system performs better than the baseline system.