Rong Ye

Rong Ye, Mingxuan Wang, Lei Li · bytedance, cmu

How can we learn unified representations for spoken utterances and their written text? Learning similar representations for semantically similar speech and text is important for speech translation. To this end, we propose ConST, a cross-modal contrastive learning method for end-to-end speech-to-text translation. We evaluate ConST and a variety of previous baselines on a popular benchmark MuST-C. Experiments show that the proposed ConST consistently outperforms the previous methods on, and achieves an average BLEU of 29.4. The analysis further verifies that ConST indeed closes the representation gap of different modalities -- its learned representation improves the accuracy of cross-modal speech-text retrieval from 4% to 88%. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ReneeYe/ConST.

Siqi Ouyang, Rong Ye, Lei Li · bytedance, cmu

End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to directly translate source speech into target text. Existing ST methods perform poorly when only extremely small speech-text data are available for training. We observe that an ST model's performance closely correlates with its embedding similarity between speech and source transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a simple and effective method for extremely low-resource speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both speech and text modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark, and on a low-resource direction Maltese-English from IWSLT 2023. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline by 9+ BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel ST data. Code is available at https://github.com/owaski/WACO.

Qingkai Fang, Rong Ye, Lei Li et al. · bytedance, cmu

How to learn a better speech representation for end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) with limited labeled data? Existing techniques often attempt to transfer powerful machine translation (MT) capabilities to ST, but neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities. In this paper, we propose the Speech-TExt Manifold Mixup (STEMM) method to calibrate such discrepancy. Specifically, we mix up the representation sequences of different modalities, and take both unimodal speech sequences and multimodal mixed sequences as input to the translation model in parallel, and regularize their output predictions with a self-learning framework. Experiments on MuST-C speech translation benchmark and further analysis show that our method effectively alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy, and achieves significant improvements over a strong baseline on eight translation directions.

Siqi Ouyang, Rong Ye, Lei Li · bytedance, cmu

Training speech translation (ST) models requires large and high-quality datasets. MuST-C is one of the most widely used ST benchmark datasets. It contains around 400 hours of speech-transcript-translation data for each of the eight translation directions. This dataset passes several quality-control filters during creation. However, we find that MuST-C still suffers from three major quality issues: audio-text misalignment, inaccurate translation, and unnecessary speaker's name. What are the impacts of these data quality issues for model development and evaluation? In this paper, we propose an automatic method to fix or filter the above quality issues, using English-German (En-De) translation as an example. Our experiments show that ST models perform better on clean test sets, and the rank of proposed models remains consistent across different test sets. Besides, simply removing misaligned data points from the training set does not lead to a better ST model.

Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Rong Ye et al. · bytedance

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) showcase advanced reasoning, yet NLP evaluations often depend on static benchmarks. Evaluating this necessitates environments that test strategic reasoning in dynamic, competitive scenarios requiring long-term planning. We introduce AucArena, a novel evaluation suite that simulates auctions, a setting chosen for being highly unpredictable and involving many skills related to resource and risk management, while also being easy to evaluate. We conduct controlled experiments using state-of-the-art LLMs to power bidding agents to benchmark their planning and execution skills. Our research demonstrates that LLMs, such as GPT-4, possess key skills for auction participation, such as budget management and goal adherence, which improve with adaptive strategies. This highlights LLMs' potential in modeling complex social interactions in competitive contexts. However, variability in LLM performance and occasional outperformance by simpler methods indicate opportunities for further advancements in LLM design and the value of our simulation environment for ongoing testing and refinement.

Chen Xu, Rong Ye, Qianqian Dong et al. · bytedance

Recently, speech-to-text translation has attracted more and more attention and many studies have emerged rapidly. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on direct speech translation aiming to summarize the current state-of-the-art techniques. First, we categorize the existing research work into three directions based on the main challenges -- modeling burden, data scarcity, and application issues. To tackle the problem of modeling burden, two main structures have been proposed, encoder-decoder framework (Transformer and the variants) and multitask frameworks. For the challenge of data scarcity, recent work resorts to many sophisticated techniques, such as data augmentation, pre-training, knowledge distillation, and multilingual modeling. We analyze and summarize the application issues, which include real-time, segmentation, named entity, gender bias, and code-switching. Finally, we discuss some promising directions for future work.

Rong Ye, Chengqi Zhao, Tom Ko et al. · bytedance

This paper introduces GigaST, a large-scale pseudo speech translation (ST) corpus. We create the corpus by translating the text in GigaSpeech, an English ASR corpus, into German and Chinese. The training set is translated by a strong machine translation system and the test set is translated by human. ST models trained with an addition of our corpus obtain new state-of-the-art results on the MuST-C English-German benchmark test set. We provide a detailed description of the translation process and verify its quality. We make the translated text data public and hope to facilitate research in speech translation. Additionally, we also release the training scripts on NeurST to make it easy to replicate our systems. GigaST dataset is available at https://st-benchmark.github.io/resources/GigaST.

Xinyi Mou, Jingcong Liang, Jiayu Lin et al. · bytedance

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly leveraged to empower autonomous agents to simulate human beings in various fields of behavioral research. However, evaluating their capacity to navigate complex social interactions remains a challenge. Previous studies face limitations due to insufficient scenario diversity, complexity, and a single-perspective focus. To this end, we introduce AgentSense: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Language Agents through Interactive Scenarios. Drawing on Dramaturgical Theory, AgentSense employs a bottom-up approach to create 1,225 diverse social scenarios constructed from extensive scripts. We evaluate LLM-driven agents through multi-turn interactions, emphasizing both goal completion and implicit reasoning. We analyze goals using ERG theory and conduct comprehensive experiments. Our findings highlight that LLMs struggle with goals in complex social scenarios, especially high-level growth needs, and even GPT-4o requires improvement in private information reasoning. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ljcleo/agent_sense}.

Jingcong Liang, Rong Ye, Meng Han et al.

How can we construct an automated debate judge to evaluate an extensive, vibrant, multi-turn debate? This task is challenging, as judging a debate involves grappling with lengthy texts, intricate argument relationships, and multi-dimensional assessments. At the same time, current research mainly focuses on short dialogues, rarely touching upon the evaluation of an entire debate. In this paper, by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose Debatrix, which makes the analysis and assessment of multi-turn debates more aligned with majority preferences. Specifically, Debatrix features a vertical, iterative chronological analysis and a horizontal, multi-dimensional evaluation collaboration. To align with real-world debate scenarios, we introduced the PanelBench benchmark, comparing our system's performance to actual debate outcomes. The findings indicate a notable enhancement over directly using LLMs for debate evaluation. Source code and benchmark data are available online at https://github.com/ljcleo/debatrix .

Jiayu Lin, Rong Ye, Meng Han et al. · bytedance

Counter-argument generation -- a captivating area in computational linguistics -- seeks to craft statements that offer opposing views. While most research has ventured into paragraph-level generation, sentence-level counter-argument generation beckons with its unique constraints and brevity-focused challenges. Furthermore, the diverse nature of counter-arguments poses challenges for evaluating model performance solely based on n-gram-based metrics. In this paper, we present the ArgTersely benchmark for sentence-level counter-argument generation, drawing from a manually annotated dataset from the ChangeMyView debate forum. We also propose Arg-LlaMA for generating high-quality counter-argument. For better evaluation, we trained a BERT-based evaluator Arg-Judge with human preference data. We conducted comparative experiments involving various baselines such as LlaMA, Alpaca, GPT-3, and others. The results show the competitiveness of our proposed framework and evaluator in counter-argument generation tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/amazingljy1206/ArgTersely.

Yingqian Wu, Qiushi Wang, Zefei Long et al.

Financial report generation tasks range from macro- to micro-economics analysis, also requiring extensive data analysis. Existing LLM models are usually fine-tuned on simple QA tasks and cannot comprehensively analyze real financial scenarios. Given the complexity, financial companies often distribute tasks among departments. Inspired by this, we propose FinTeam, a financial multi-agent collaborative system, with a workflow with four LLM agents: document analyzer, analyst, accountant, and consultant. We train these agents with specific financial expertise using constructed datasets. We evaluate FinTeam on comprehensive financial tasks constructed from real online investment forums, including macroeconomic, industry, and company analysis. The human evaluation shows that by combining agents, the financial reports generate from FinTeam achieved a 62.00% acceptance rate, outperforming baseline models like GPT-4o and Xuanyuan. Additionally, FinTeam's agents demonstrate a 7.43% average improvement on FinCUGE and a 2.06% accuracy boost on FinEval. Project is available at https://github.com/FudanDISC/DISC-FinLLM/.

Dong Zhang, Rong Ye, Tom Ko et al.

How can speech-to-text translation (ST) perform as well as machine translation (MT)? The key point is to bridge the modality gap between speech and text so that useful MT techniques can be applied to ST. Recently, the approach of representing speech with unsupervised discrete units yields a new way to ease the modality problem. This motivates us to propose Discrete Unit Back-translation (DUB) to answer two questions: (1) Is it better to represent speech with discrete units than with continuous features in direct ST? (2) How much benefit can useful MT techniques bring to ST? With DUB, the back-translation technique can successfully be applied on direct ST and obtains an average boost of 5.5 BLEU on MuST-C En-De/Fr/Es. In the low-resource language scenario, our method achieves comparable performance to existing methods that rely on large-scale external data. Code and models are available at https://github.com/0nutation/DUB.

Chengqi Zhao, Zhicheng Liu, Jian Tong et al.

This paper describes the systems submitted to IWSLT 2021 by the Volctrans team. We participate in the offline speech translation and text-to-text simultaneous translation tracks. For offline speech translation, our best end-to-end model achieves 8.1 BLEU improvements over the benchmark on the MuST-C test set and is even approaching the results of a strong cascade solution. For text-to-text simultaneous translation, we explore the best practice to optimize the wait-k model. As a result, our final submitted systems exceed the benchmark at around 7 BLEU on the same latency regime. We will publish our code and model to facilitate both future research works and industrial applications. This paper describes the systems submitted to IWSLT 2021 by the Volctrans team. We participate in the offline speech translation and text-to-text simultaneous translation tracks. For offline speech translation, our best end-to-end model achieves 7.9 BLEU improvements over the benchmark on the MuST-C test set and is even approaching the results of a strong cascade solution. For text-to-text simultaneous translation, we explore the best practice to optimize the wait-k model. As a result, our final submitted systems exceed the benchmark at around 7 BLEU on the same latency regime. We release our code and model at \url{https://github.com/bytedance/neurst/tree/master/examples/iwslt21} to facilitate both future research works and industrial applications.

Rong Ye, Mingxuan Wang, Lei Li

End-to-end speech translation models have become a new trend in research due to their potential of reducing error propagation. However, these models still suffer from the challenge of data scarcity. How to effectively use unlabeled or other parallel corpora from machine translation is promising but still an open problem. In this paper, we propose Cross Speech-Text Network (XSTNet), an end-to-end model for speech-to-text translation. XSTNet takes both speech and text as input and outputs both transcription and translation text. The model benefits from its three key design aspects: a self-supervised pre-trained sub-network as the audio encoder, a multi-task training objective to exploit additional parallel bilingual text, and a progressive training procedure. We evaluate the performance of XSTNet and baselines on the MuST-C En-X and LibriSpeech En-Fr datasets. In particular, XSTNet achieves state-of-the-art results on all language directions with an average BLEU of 28.8, outperforming the previous best method by 3.2 BLEU. Code, models, cases, and more detailed analysis are available at https://github.com/ReneeYe/XSTNet.

Chengqi Zhao, Mingxuan Wang, Qianqian Dong et al.

NeurST is an open-source toolkit for neural speech translation. The toolkit mainly focuses on end-to-end speech translation, which is easy to use, modify, and extend to advanced speech translation research and products. NeurST aims at facilitating the speech translation research for NLP researchers and building reliable benchmarks for this field. It provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation. In this paper, we will introduce the framework design of NeurST and show experimental results for different benchmark datasets, which can be regarded as reliable baselines for future research. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/bytedance/neurst/ and we will continuously update the performance of NeurST with other counterparts and studies at https://st-benchmark.github.io/.

Qianqian Dong, Rong Ye, Mingxuan Wang et al.

An end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) takes audio in a source language and outputs the text in a target language. Existing methods are limited by the amount of parallel corpus. Can we build a system to fully utilize signals in a parallel ST corpus? We are inspired by human understanding system which is composed of auditory perception and cognitive processing. In this paper, we propose Listen-Understand-Translate, (LUT), a unified framework with triple supervision signals to decouple the end-to-end speech-to-text translation task. LUT is able to guide the acoustic encoder to extract as much information from the auditory input. In addition, LUT utilizes a pre-trained BERT model to enforce the upper encoder to produce as much semantic information as possible, without extra data. We perform experiments on a diverse set of speech translation benchmarks, including Librispeech English-French, IWSLT English-German and TED English-Chinese. Our results demonstrate LUT achieves the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous methods. The code is available at https://github.com/dqqcasia/st.

Zhichao Huang, Rong Ye, Tom Ko et al. · bytedance

Given the great success of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks, in this paper, we introduce LLM-ST, a novel and effective speech translation model constructed upon a pre-trained LLM. By integrating the large language model (LLM) with a speech encoder and employing multi-task instruction tuning, LLM-ST can produce accurate timestamped transcriptions and translations, even from long audio inputs. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the implementation of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can yield advantages in the context of LLM-ST. Through rigorous experimentation on English and Chinese datasets, we showcase the exceptional performance of LLM-ST, establishing a new benchmark in the field of speech translation. Demo: https://speechtranslation.github.io/llm-st/.

Yichi Zhou, Jianqiu Zhao, Yongxin Zhang et al.

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in intelligence, performing comparably to human experts on complex reasoning tasks such as coding and mathematical reasoning. However, generating formal proofs in specialized languages like Lean 4 remains a significant challenge for these models, limiting their application in complex theorem proving and automated verification. Current approaches typically require specializing models through fine-tuning on dedicated formal corpora, incurring high costs for data collection and training. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Delta Prover}, an agent-based framework that orchestrates the interaction between a general-purpose LLM and the Lean 4 proof environment. Delta Prover leverages the reflection and reasoning capabilities of general-purpose LLMs to interactively construct formal proofs in Lean 4, circumventing the need for model specialization. At its core, the agent integrates two novel, interdependent components: an algorithmic framework for reflective decomposition and iterative proof repair, and a custom Domain-Specific Language (DSL) built upon Lean 4 for streamlined subproblem management. \textbf{Delta Prover achieves a state-of-the-art 95.9\% success rate on the miniF2F-test benchmark, surpassing all existing approaches, including those requiring model specialization.} Furthermore, Delta Prover exhibits a significantly stronger test-time scaling law compared to standard Best-of-N proof strategies. Crucially, our findings demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs, when guided by an effective agentic structure, possess substantial untapped theorem-proving capabilities. This presents a computationally efficient alternative to specialized models for robust automated reasoning in formal environments.

Rong Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Yikai Zhang et al. · bytedance

Achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires AI agents that can not only make stratigic decisions but also engage in flexible and meaningful communication. Inspired by Wittgenstein's language game theory in Philosophical Investigations, we propose that language agents can learn through in-context interaction rather than traditional multi-stage frameworks that separate decision-making from language expression. Using Werewolf, a social deduction game that tests language understanding, strategic interaction, and adaptability, we develop the Multi-agent Kahneman & Tversky's Optimization (MaKTO). MaKTO engages diverse models in extensive gameplay to generate unpaired desirable and unacceptable responses, then employs KTO to refine the model's decision-making process. In 9-player Werewolf games, MaKTO achieves a 61% average win rate across various models, outperforming GPT-4o and two-stage RL agents by relative improvements of 23.0% and 10.9%, respectively. Notably, MaKTO also demonstrates human-like performance, winning 60% against expert players and showing only 49% detectability in Turing-style blind tests.

Shanbo Cheng, Yu Bao, Zhichao Huang et al.

Simultaneous Interpretation (SI) represents one of the most daunting frontiers in the translation industry, with product-level automatic systems long plagued by intractable challenges: subpar transcription and translation quality, lack of real-time speech generation, multi-speaker confusion, and translated speech inflation, especially in long-form discourses. In this study, we introduce Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0, an end-to-end SI model that delivers high-fidelity, ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech generation with voice cloning capabilities. As a fully operational product-level solution, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 tackles these challenges head-on through our novel duplex speech-to-speech understanding-generating framework. Experimental results demonstrate that through large-scale pretraining and reinforcement learning, the model achieves a significantly better balance between translation accuracy and latency, validated by human interpreters to exceed 70% correctness in complex scenarios. Notably, Seed-LiveInterpret 2.0 outperforms commercial SI solutions by significant margins in translation quality, while slashing the average latency of cloned speech from nearly 10 seconds to a near-real-time 3 seconds, which is around a near 70% reduction that drastically enhances practical usability.

Wenbiao Yin, Zhicheng Liu, Chengqi Zhao et al.

In speech translation, leveraging multimodal data to improve model performance and address limitations of individual modalities has shown significant effectiveness. In this paper, we harness the complementary strengths of speech and text, which are disparate modalities. We observe three levels of modality gap between them, denoted by Modal input representation, Modal semantic, and Modal hidden states. To tackle these gaps, we propose \textbf{F}use-\textbf{S}peech-\textbf{T}ext (\textbf{FST}), a cross-modal model which supports three distinct input modalities for translation: speech, text, and fused speech-text. We leverage multiple techniques for cross-modal alignment and conduct a comprehensive analysis to assess its impact on speech translation, machine translation, and fused speech-text translation. We evaluate FST on MuST-C, GigaST, and newstest benchmark. Experiments show that the proposed FST achieves an average 34.0 BLEU on MuST-C En$\rightarrow$De/Es/Fr (vs SOTA +1.1 BLEU). Further experiments demonstrate that FST does not degrade on MT task, as observed in prior works. Instead, it yields an average improvement of 3.2 BLEU over the pre-trained MT model.

Rong Ye, Wenxian Shi, Hao Zhou et al.

How to generate descriptions from structured data organized in tables? Existing approaches using neural encoder-decoder models often suffer from lacking diversity. We claim that an open set of templates is crucial for enriching the phrase constructions and realizing varied generations. Learning such templates is prohibitive since it often requires a large paired <table, description> corpus, which is seldom available. This paper explores the problem of automatically learning reusable "templates" from paired and non-paired data. We propose the variational template machine (VTM), a novel method to generate text descriptions from data tables. Our contributions include: a) we carefully devise a specific model architecture and losses to explicitly disentangle text template and semantic content information, in the latent spaces, and b)we utilize both small parallel data and large raw text without aligned tables to enrich the template learning. Experiments on datasets from a variety of different domains show that VTM is able to generate more diversely while keeping a good fluency and quality.