# Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05171/) (2020)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Models Can Directly Translate Foreign Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08581/) (2017)
- [Listen and Translate: A Proof of Concept for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01744/) (2016)
- [Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05218/) (2019)
- [Learning to Translate in Real-time with Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00388/) (2016)
- [SimulEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16193/) (2020)
- [Monotonic Multihead Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12406/) (2019)
- [Can neural machine translation do simultaneous translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02012/) (2016)
- [ESPnet-ST: All-in-One Speech Translation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10234/) (2020)
- [SimulMT to SimulST: Adapting Simultaneous Text Translation to End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02048/) (2020)
- [CIF: Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11235/) (2019)
- [Pre-training on high-resource speech recognition improves low-resource speech-to-text translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01431/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Automatic Speech Translation of Audiobooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04200/) (2018)
- [Efficient Wait-k Models for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08595/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Speech Translation with Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08075/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Weakly Supervised Data to Improve End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02050/) (2018)
- [Curriculum Pre-training for End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10093/) (2020)
- [Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14920/) (2020)
- [Dual-decoder Transformer for Joint Automatic Speech Recognition and Multilingual Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00747/) (2020)
- [Lightweight Adapter Tuning for Multilingual Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01463/) (2021)
- [Incremental Decoding and Training Methods for Simultaneous Translation in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03661/) (2018)
- [Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03095/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Speech Translation via Cross-modal Progressive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10380/) (2021)
- [RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04833/) (2021)
- [Simpler and Faster Learning of Adaptive Policies for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01559/) (2019)
- [Re-translation versus Streaming for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03643/) (2020)

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

- [SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14259/) (2023)
- [Information-Transport-based Policy for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12357/) (2022)
- [Turning Whisper into Real-Time Transcription System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14743/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Differentiable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16093/) (2023)
- [StreamSpeech: Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03049/) (2024)
- [StreamAtt: Direct Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation with Attention-based Audio History Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06097/) (2024)
- [How "Real" is Your Real-Time Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation System?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18495/) (2024)
- [Exploring Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09595/) (2022)
- [Towards Achieving Human Parity on End-to-end Simultaneous Speech Translation via LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21646/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation with Fully Unidirectional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11809/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01053/) (2023)
- [LLM as Effective Streaming Processor: Bridging Streaming-Batch Mismatches with Group Position Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16983/) (2025)
- [InfiniSST: Simultaneous Translation of Unbounded Speech with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02969/) (2025)
- [Simul-Whisper: Attention-Guided Streaming Whisper with Truncation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10052/) (2024)
- [FASST: Fast LLM-based Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09430/) (2024)
- [Adapting Offline Speech Translation Models for Streaming with Future-Aware Distillation and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07914/) (2023)
- [Unified Segment-to-Segment Framework for Simultaneous Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17940/) (2023)
- [StreamUni: Achieving Streaming Speech Translation with a Unified Large Speech-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07803/) (2025)
- [Recent Advances in End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00497/) (2024)
- [Label-Synchronous Neural Transducer for E2E Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04541/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are Read/Write Policy-Makers for Simultaneous Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00868/) (2025)
- [Align, Write, Re-order: Explainable End-to-End Speech Translation via Operation Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05967/) (2022)
- [AdaTranS: Adapting with Boundary-based Shrinking for End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08911/) (2022)
- [SimulS2S-LLM: Unlocking Simultaneous Inference of Speech LLMs for Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15509/) (2025)
- [Streaming Sequence Transduction through Dynamic Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01172/) (2024)
- [SASST: Leveraging Syntax-Aware Chunking and LLMs for Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07781/) (2025)
- [SimulMEGA: MoE Routers are Advanced Policy Makers for Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01200/) (2025)
- [Direct Simultaneous Translation Activation for Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15692/) (2025)
- [SimulSense: Sense-Driven Interpreting for Efficient Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21932/) (2025)
- [Dual-Stream Simultaneous Translation via 2D Grid Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34902/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How to find proper moments to generate partial sentence translation given a streaming speech input? Existing approaches waiting-and-translating for a fixed duration often break the acoustic units in speech, since the boundaries between acoustic units in speech are not even. In this paper, we propose MoSST, a simple yet effective method for translating streaming speech content. Given a usually long speech sequence, we develop an efficient monotonic segmentation module inside an encoder-decoder model to accumulate acoustic information incrementally and detect proper speech unit boundaries for the input in speech translation task. Experiments on multiple translation directions of the MuST-C dataset show that MoSST outperforms existing methods and achieves the best trade-off between translation quality (BLEU) and latency. Our code is available at https://github.com/dqqcasia/mosst.