Simultaneous speech translation is an essential communication task difficult for humans whereby a translation is generated concurrently with oncoming speech inputs. For such a streaming task, transformers using block processing to break an input sequence into segments have achieved state-of-the-art performance at a reduced cost. Current methods to allow information to propagate across segments, including left context and memory banks, have faltered as they are both insufficient representations and unnecessarily expensive to compute. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Memory Transformer that implicitly retains memory through a new left context method, removing the need to explicitly represent memory with memory banks. We generate the left context from the attention output of the previous segment and include it in the keys and values of the current segment’s attention calculation. Experiments on the MuST-C dataset show that the Implicit Memory Transformer provides a substantial speedup on the encoder forward pass with nearly identical translation quality when compared with the state-of-the-art approach that employs both left context and memory banks.
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Shiftable Context: Addressing Training-Inference Context Mismatch in Simultaneous Speech Translation
Transformer models using segment-based processing have been an effective architecture for simultaneous speech translation. However, such models create a context mismatch between training and inference environments, hindering potential translation accuracy. We solve this issue by proposing Shiftable Context, a simple yet effective scheme to ensure that consistent segment and context sizes are maintained throughout training and inference, even with the presence of partially filled segments due to the streaming nature of simultaneous translation. Shiftable Context is also broadly applicable to segment-based transformers for streaming tasks. Our experiments on the English-German, English-French, and English-Spanish language pairs from the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that when applied to the Augmented Memory Transformer, a state-of-the-art model for simultaneous speech translation, the proposed scheme achieves an average increase of 2.09, 1.83, and 1.95 BLEU scores across each wait-k value for the three language pairs, respectively, with a minimal impact on computation-aware Average Lagging.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2223483
- PAR ID:
- 10462266
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Machine Learning
- Volume:
- 202
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 28519-28530
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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