Nameer Hirschkind

Joseph Liu, Nameer Hirschkind, Xiao Yu et al.

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) requires balancing high translation quality with low latency. Recent work introduced REINA, a method that trains a Read/Write policy based on estimating the information gain of reading more audio. However, we find that information-based policies often lack temporal context, leading the policy to bias itself toward reading most of the audio before starting to write. We improve REINA using two distinct strategies: a supervised alignment network (REINA-SAN) and a timestep-augmented network (REINA-TAN). Our results demonstrate that while both methods significantly outperform the baseline and resolve stability issues, REINA-TAN provides a slightly superior Pareto frontier for streaming efficiency, whereas REINA-SAN offers more robustness against 'read loops'. Applied to Whisper, both methods improve the pareto frontier of streaming efficiency as measured by Normalized Streaming Efficiency (NoSE) scores up to 7.1% over existing competitive baselines.

Nameer Hirschkind, Joseph Liu, Xiao Yu et al.

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) systems stream in audio while simultaneously emitting translated text or speech. Such systems face the significant challenge of balancing translation quality and latency. We introduce a strategy to optimize this tradeoff: wait for more input only if you gain information by doing so. Based on this strategy, we present Regularized Entropy INformation Adaptation (REINA), a novel loss to train an adaptive policy using an existing non-streaming translation model. We derive REINA from information theory principles and show that REINA helps push the reported Pareto frontier of the latency/quality tradeoff over prior works. Utilizing REINA, we train a SimulST model on French, Spanish and German, both from and into English. Training on only open source or synthetically generated data, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) streaming results for models of comparable size. We also introduce a metric for streaming efficiency, quantitatively showing REINA improves the latency/quality trade-off by as much as 21% compared to prior approaches, normalized against non-streaming baseline BLEU scores.

Nameer Hirschkind, Xiao Yu, Mahesh Kumar Nandwana et al.

We introduce DiffuseST, a low-latency, direct speech-to-speech translation system capable of preserving the input speaker's voice zero-shot while translating from multiple source languages into English. We experiment with the synthesizer component of the architecture, comparing a Tacotron-based synthesizer to a novel diffusion-based synthesizer. We find the diffusion-based synthesizer to improve MOS and PESQ audio quality metrics by 23\% each and speaker similarity by 5\% while maintaining comparable BLEU scores. Despite having more than double the parameter count, the diffusion synthesizer has lower latency, allowing the entire model to run more than 5$\times$ faster than real-time.