# Simpler and Faster Learning of Adaptive Policies for Simultaneous Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01559 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01559/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04833/) (2021)
- [Information-Transport-based Policy for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12357/) (2022)
- [Universal Simultaneous Machine Translation with Mixture-of-Experts Wait-k Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05238/) (2021)
- [Direct Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation Assisted by Synchronized Streaming ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06636/) (2021)
- [Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/) (2021)
- [Hidden Markov Transformer for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00257/) (2023)
- [Modeling Dual Read/Write Paths for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09163/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Multi-head Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09072/) (2022)
- [Reducing Position Bias in Simultaneous Machine Translation with Length-Aware Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09053/) (2022)
- [Wait-info Policy: Balancing Source and Target at Information Level for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11220/) (2022)
- [Learning Optimal Policy for Simultaneous Machine Translation via Binary Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12774/) (2023)
- [Turning Fixed to Adaptive: Integrating Post-Evaluation into Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11900/) (2022)
- [SeqPO-SiMT: Sequential Policy Optimization for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20622/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Masking, Not Prompting Optimization: A Paradigm Shift in Fine-tuning LLMs for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10443/) (2024)
- [Learning Coupled Policies for Simultaneous Machine Translation using Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04306/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Policy with Wait-k Model for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14853/) (2023)
- [Seed LiveInterpret 2.0: End-to-end Simultaneous Speech-to-speech Translation with Your Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17527/) (2025)
- [Simultaneous Speech Translation for Live Subtitling: from Delay to Display](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08807/) (2021)
- [Incremental Blockwise Beam Search for Simultaneous Speech Translation with Controllable Quality-Latency Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11379/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11387/) (2021)
- [Simultaneous Multi-Pivot Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07410/) (2021)
- [Continuous Rating as Reliable Human Evaluation of Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02458/) (2022)
- [Anticipation-Free Training for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12868/) (2022)
- [TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10845/) (2023)
- [Monotonic Simultaneous Translation with Chunk-wise Reordering and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09646/) (2021)
- [LEAPT: Learning Adaptive Prefix-to-prefix Translation For Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11750/) (2023)
- [Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Constituent Label Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13480/) (2021)
- [Visualization: the missing factor in Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00514/) (2021)
- [Supervised Visual Attention for Simultaneous Multimodal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09324/) (2022)
- [Fixed and Adaptive Simultaneous Machine Translation Strategies Using Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13469/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simultaneous translation is widely useful but remains challenging. Previous work falls into two main categories: (a) fixed-latency policies such as Ma et al. (2019) and (b) adaptive policies such as Gu et al. (2017). The former are simple and effective, but have to aggressively predict future content due to diverging source-target word order; the latter do not anticipate, but suffer from unstable and inefficient training. To combine the merits of both approaches, we propose a simple supervised-learning framework to learn an adaptive policy from oracle READ/WRITE sequences generated from parallel text. At each step, such an oracle sequence chooses to WRITE the next target word if the available source sentence context provides enough information to do so, otherwise READ the next source word. Experiments on German<->English show that our method, without retraining the underlying NMT model, can learn flexible policies with better BLEU scores and similar latencies compared to previous work.