Challenge: Existing methods to improve end-to-end speech translation (ST) use multitask learning, but there is always a modality gap between ST and MT due to the differences between speech and text.
Approach: They propose a method to bridge the modality gap between ST and MT by leveraging (text) machine translation data.
Outcome: The proposed method bridges the modality gap and achieves significant improvements over baseline in all eight directions.

Similar Papers

Modality Adaption or Regularization? A Case Study on End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: End-to-end speech translation models have limited training data and are often inefficient due to the inconsistency of length and representation between speech and text.
Approach: They find that the "modality gap" between speech and text data is not a major problem in E2E ST . they decouple the encoder to speech encoder and text encoder, and they find that there is a 'capacity gap'
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 29.0 for en-de and 40.3 for fr on the MuST-C dataset.
Understanding the Modality Gap: An Empirical Study on the Speech-Text Alignment Mechanism of Large Speech Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: LSLMs have impressive conversational generation abilities, but consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks.
Approach: They propose to analyze the performance gap between speech and text inputs through a systematic experiment . they find that representation similarity is strongly correlated with the modality gap .
Outcome: The proposed models improve the accuracy of speech inputs and their semantic understanding benchmarks.
Consistency is Key: On Data-Efficient Modality Transfer in Speech Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: End-to-end approaches to speech translation suffer from data scarcity compared to machine translation (MT).
Approach: They propose a method which combines knowledge distillation and consistency learning to break the dilemma of learning-forgetting.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the previous methods on a MuST-C dataset even without additional data.
Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to end-to-end Speech Translation (ST) systems require limited data, which can cause data scarcity and performance degradation.
Approach: They propose a method for zero-shot ST that bridges the modality gap without any paired ST data.
Outcome: The proposed method bridges the modality gap without any paired ST data on a speech encoder and on MT models.
Low-resource Neural Machine Translation with Cross-modal Alignment (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing neural machine translation techniques rely on large monolingual corpus, which is costly for some low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method to learn a shared space for all languages by additional visual modality.
Outcome: The proposed method can learn cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment with small amount of image-text pairs and achieves significant improvements over the text-only baseline.
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with end-to-end speech translation (ST) but their effectiveness has not been thoroughly studied.
Approach: They propose an improved multi-task learning approach for the ST task that bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the MuST-C dataset with 20.8% of training time required by the current SOTA method.
Cross-modal Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches for speech translation focus on using additional data from MT and automatic speech recognition (ASR).
Approach: They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method for end-to-end speech-totext translation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a popular benchmark MuST-C.
PEIT: Bridging the Modality Gap with Pre-trained Models for End-to-End Image Translation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Image translation is a task that translates an image containing text in the source language to the target language.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end image translation framework that bridges the modality gap between visual inputs and textual inputs/outputs of machine translation (MT).
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models on a large-scale image translation corpus . it significantly outperformed both cascaded and strong models on the e-commerce domain .
Bridging the Gap between Language Models and Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train cross-lingual pre-trained language models have shown great success in cross-linguistic sequence labeling tasks.
Approach: They propose a cross-lingual language informative span masking task to eliminate the objective gap between pre-training and fine-tuning stages.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks even with limited pre-training data.
Towards Zero-shot Learning for End-to-end Cross-modal Translation Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: End-to-end zero-shot speech translation model is based on a zero-shot approach, but it is less competitive because of the limited amount of data available for multiple modalities.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end zero-shot speech translation model that connects two pre-trained uni-modality modules via word rotator’s distance.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than or as well as those of the CTC-based models and can be trained in an end-to-end style to avoid error propagation.

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