14 accepted papers
Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework. As these models are rapidly evolving toward general-purpose instruction following across diverse and complex tasks, a key frontier is evaluat…
Following the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in NLP tasks, there is increasing interest in extending their capabilities to speech—the most common form of communication. The most widespread approach to integrating speech into LLMs is dense feature prepending (DFP), which prepends…
The attention mechanism, a cornerstone of state-of-the-art neural models, faces computational hurdles in processing long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, research efforts in the last few years focused on finding more efficient alternatives. Among them, Hyena (Poli et al., 202…
The growing need for instant spoken language transcription and translation is driven by increased global communication and cross-lingual interactions. This has made offering translations in multiple languages essential for user applications. Traditional approaches to automatic speech recognition (AS…
The rise of foundation models (FMs), coupled with regulatory efforts addressing their risks and impacts, has sparked significant interest in open-source models. However, existing speech FMs (SFMs) fall short of full compliance with the open-source principles, even if claimed otherwise, as no existin…
Subtitling plays a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of audiovisual content and encompasses three primary subtasks: translating spoken dialogue, segmenting translations into concise textual units, and estimating timestamps that govern their on-screen duration. Past attempts to automate thi…
The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently witnessed a transformative shift with the emergence of foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) that have revolutionized text-based NLP. This paradigm has extended to other modalities, including speech, where researchers…
Streaming speech-to-text translation (StreamST) is the task of automatically translating speech while incrementally receiving an audio stream. Unlike simultaneous ST (SimulST), which deals with pre-segmented speech, StreamST faces the challenges of handling continuous and unbounded audio streams. Th…
Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies. Current evaluations are often restricted to automatic methods…
Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed solely based on the perceived quality of results. This assumption, however, comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and, in turn, potentially misleading findings. To mitigate this risk, we posit that the current f…
In simultaneous speech translation (SimulST), effective policies that determine when to write partial translations are crucial to reach high output quality with low latency. Towards this objective, we propose EDAtt (Encoder-Decoder Attention), an adaptive policy that exploits the attention patterns…
When translating words referring to the speaker, speech translation (ST) systems should not resort to default masculine generics nor rely on potentially misleading vocal traits. Rather, they should assign gender according to the speakers' preference. The existing solutions to do so, though effectiv…
In simultaneous speech translation (SimulST), finding the best trade-off between high output quality and low latency is a challenging task. To meet the latency constraints posed by different application scenarios, multiple dedicated SimulST models are usually trained and maintained, generating high…
Transformer-based models have gained increasing popularity achieving state-of-the-art performance in many research fields including speech translation. However, Transformer’s quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length prevents its adoption as is with audio signals, which are typi…