# Tuning Large language model for End-to-end Speech Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02050 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02050/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11000/) (2023)
- [Listen, Think, and Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10790/) (2023)
- [fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05171/) (2020)
- [Linearly Mapping from Image to Text Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15162/) (2022)
- [X-LLM: Bootstrapping Advanced Large Language Models by Treating Multi-Modalities as Foreign Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04160/) (2023)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Models Can Directly Translate Foreign Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08581/) (2017)
- [Self-training and Pre-training are Complementary for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11430/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Unified Speech-Text Pre-training for Speech Translation and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05409/) (2022)
- [Cross-modal Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02444/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Speech Translation with Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08075/) (2019)
- [LLaSM: Large Language and Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15930/) (2023)
- [Curriculum Pre-training for End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10093/) (2020)
- [STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10426/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14920/) (2020)
- [Improving Speech Translation by Understanding and Learning from the Auxiliary Text Translation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05782/) (2021)
- [Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03095/) (2021)
- [Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05752/) (2021)
- [SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03730/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Speech Translation with Speech Foundation Models and Large Language Models: What is There and What is Missing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12025/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Limits of Zero-shot End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10422/) (2024)
- [LLaST: Improved End-to-end Speech Translation System Leveraged by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15415/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation with Fully Unidirectional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11809/) (2025)
- [FASST: Fast LLM-based Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09430/) (2024)
- [How to Connect Speech Foundation Models and Large Language Models? What Matters and What Does Not](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17044/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Inner Speech-Text Alignment for LLM-based Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10211/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Policy Optimization for Simultaneous Translation of Unbounded Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21045/) (2026)
- [Do Spoken Language Models Hear Speech as They Read Text? Bridging Structural Gaps Between Speech and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22908/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), multimodal models based on LLMs have demonstrated significant potential. Models such as LLaSM, X-LLM, and SpeechGPT exhibit an impressive ability to comprehend and generate human instructions. However, their performance often falters when faced with complex tasks like end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST), a cross-language and cross-modal translation task. In comparison to single-modal models, multimodal models lag behind in these scenarios. This paper introduces LST, a Large multimodal model designed to excel at the E2E-ST task. LST consists of a speech frontend, an adapter, and a LLM backend. The training of LST consists of two stages: (1) Modality adjustment, where the adapter is tuned to align speech representation with text embedding space, and (2) Downstream task fine-tuning, where both the adapter and LLM model are trained to optimize performance on the E2EST task. Experimental results on the MuST-C speech translation benchmark demonstrate that LST-13B achieves BLEU scores of 30.39/41.55/35.33 on En-De/En-Fr/En-Es language pairs, surpassing previous models and establishing a new state-of-the-art. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of single-modal model selection and the impact of training strategies, which lays the foundation for future research. We will open up our code and models after review.