Papers by Qingkai Fang
Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Authentic Images for Multimodal Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require associated image with input sentence, which is difficult to satisfy at inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use synthetic and authentic images to generate translations using text-to-image generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on En-De and En-Fr datasets while remaining independent of authentic images during inference. |
Neural Machine Translation with Phrase-Level Universal Visual Representations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal machine translation methods require paired input of source sentence and image, which makes them suffer from shortage of sentence-image pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level retrieval-based method to get visual information from existing sentence-image data sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on multiple MMT datasets, especially when the textual context is limited. |
LLaMA-Omni 2: LLM-based Real-time Spoken Chatbot with Autoregressive Streaming Speech Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLaMA-Omni 2 is a series of speech language models (SpeechLMs) based on large language models. |
| Approach: | They introduce a series of speech language models capable of real-time speech interaction . LLaMA-Omni 2 trains on 200K multi-turn speech dialogue samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed speech language models surpass state-of-the-art models on spoken question answering and speech instruction. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models require text supervision during training, which is not feasible for numerous unwritten languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) model that generates discrete units from the source speech and employs a unit-based vocoder to synthesize the target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves translation quality comparable to the autoregressive model while preserving up to 26.81 decoding speedup. |
Efficient Training for Cross-lingual Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large language models (LLMs) focus on the text modality, making speech modeling difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual speech language model that trains on discrete speech tokens to achieve cross-modal and cross-linguistic alignment through continual pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment through continual pre-training. |
StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing simultaneous translation methods focus on text-to-text and speech-totext translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Simul-S2ST model that jointly learns translation and simultaneous policy in a unified framework of multi-task learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform offline and simultaneous speech recognition, speech translation and speech synthesis via an "All-in-One" seamless model. |
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. |
A Non-autoregressive Generation Framework for End-to-End Simultaneous Speech-to-Any Translation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing translation pipelines require additional cascade components to achieve speech-to-speech translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive generation framework for simultaneous speech translation . it integrates both text-to-text and speech-tospeech tasks into a unified framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in speech-to-text and speech- to-speech tasks. |
Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, but transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data to enhance ST without generating source transcripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets. |
Can We Achieve High-quality Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech Data? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation models require parallel speech data to train, which is challenging to collect. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) model that decomposes the task into speech- to-text translation (s2TT) and text-tospech (TTS) they propose 'composer' S2ST model that integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2 ST model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2ST model without parallel speech data. |
CMOT: Cross-modal Mixup via Optimal Transport for Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to translate speech signals into text are limited by the modality gap between speech and text. |
| Approach: | They propose Cross-modal Mixup via Optimal Transport to overcome the modality gap between speech and text by finding alignment between modalities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the MuST-C ST benchmark show that CMOT achieves an average BLEU of 30.0 in 8 translation directions, outperforming previous methods. |
STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn speech representations for end-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate the representation discrepancy between modalities by mixing up the representation sequences of different modality inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy and improves on a strong baseline on eight translation directions. |
Understanding and Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |