# mSLAM: Massively multilingual joint pre-training for speech and text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 108 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03193/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [MLS: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03411/) (2020)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07475/) (2019)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05019/) (2019)
- [Pushing the Limits of Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10504/) (2020)
- [Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01464/) (2019)
- [Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05874/) (2020)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11084/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 108)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12925/) (2023)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Speech Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03329/) (2023)
- [ONE-PEACE: Exploring One General Representation Model Toward Unlimited Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11172/) (2023)
- [Textually Pretrained Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13009/) (2023)
- [Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08821/) (2024)
- [MAESTRO: Matched Speech Text Representations through Modality Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03409/) (2022)
- [Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03983/) (2022)
- [SLM: Bridge the thin gap between speech and text foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00230/) (2023)
- [SpeechVerse: A Large-scale Generalizable Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08295/) (2024)
- [Do Current Multi-Task Optimization Methods in Deep Learning Even Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11379/) (2022)
- [UnitY: Two-pass Direct Speech-to-speech Translation with Discrete Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08055/) (2022)
- [SpeechLM: Enhanced Speech Pre-Training with Unpaired Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15329/) (2022)
- [SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03730/) (2022)
- [VATLM: Visual-Audio-Text Pre-Training with Unified Masked Prediction for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11275/) (2022)
- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [SLTUNET: A Simple Unified Model for Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01778/) (2023)
- [SAMU-XLSR: Semantically-Aligned Multimodal Utterance-level Cross-Lingual Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08180/) (2022)
- [Improving Massively Multilingual ASR With Auxiliary CTC Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12829/) (2023)
- [Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08715/) (2023)
- [Pre-training for Speech Translation: CTC Meets Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11716/) (2023)
- [Audio Large Language Models Can Be Descriptive Speech Quality Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17202/) (2025)
- [JOIST: A Joint Speech and Text Streaming Model For ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07353/) (2022)
- [XTREME-S: Evaluating Cross-lingual Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10752/) (2022)
- [Leveraging unsupervised and weakly-supervised data to improve direct speech-to-speech translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13339/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present mSLAM, a multilingual Speech and LAnguage Model that learns cross-lingual cross-modal representations of speech and text by pre-training jointly on large amounts of unlabeled speech and text in multiple languages. mSLAM combines w2v-BERT pre-training on speech with SpanBERT pre-training on character-level text, along with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) losses on paired speech and transcript data, to learn a single model capable of learning from and representing both speech and text signals in a shared representation space. We evaluate mSLAM on several downstream speech understanding tasks and find that joint pre-training with text improves quality on speech translation, speech intent classification and speech language-ID while being competitive on multilingual ASR, when compared against speech-only pre-training. Our speech translation model demonstrates zero-shot text translation without seeing any text translation data, providing evidence for cross-modal alignment of representations. mSLAM also benefits from multi-modal fine-tuning, further improving the quality of speech translation by directly leveraging text translation data during the fine-tuning process. Our empirical analysis highlights several opportunities and challenges arising from large-scale multimodal pre-training, suggesting directions for future research.