# Compact Speech Translation Models via Discrete Speech Units Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [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)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00355/) (2021)
- [fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05171/) (2020)
- [Comparative layer-wise analysis of self-supervised speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03929/) (2022)
- [Transformers without Tears: Improving the Normalization of Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05895/) (2019)
- [Bridging the Modality Gap for Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14920/) (2020)
- [CTC-based Compression for Direct Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01578/) (2021)
- [Exploring Speech Recognition, Translation, and Understanding with Discrete Speech Units: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15800/) (2023)
- [SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03730/) (2022)
- [Source and Target Bidirectional Knowledge Distillation for End-to-end Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06457/) (2021)
- [Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08715/) (2023)
- [Wav2Seq: Pre-training Speech-to-Text Encoder-Decoder Models Using Pseudo Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01086/) (2022)
- [Revisiting End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation From Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04571/) (2022)
- [Pre-training for Speech Translation: CTC Meets Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11716/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CoSTA: Code-Switched Speech Translation using Aligned Speech-Text Interleaving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10993/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a pretraining method to use Self-Supervised Speech (SSS) model to creating more compact Speech-to-text Translation. In contrast to using the SSS model for initialization, our method is more suitable to memory constrained scenario such as on-device deployment. Our method is based on Discrete Speech Units (DSU) extracted from the SSS model. In the first step, our method pretrains two smaller encoder-decoder models on 1) Filterbank-to-DSU (Fbk-to-DSU) and 2) DSU-to-Translation (DSU-to-Trl) data respectively. The DSU thus become the distillation inputs of the smaller models. Subsequently, the encoder from the Fbk-to-DSU model and the decoder from the DSU-to-Trl model are taken to initialise the compact model. Finally, the compact model is finetuned on the paired Fbk-Trl data. In addition to being compact, our method requires no transcripts, making it applicable to low-resource settings. It also avoids speech discretization in inference and is more robust to the DSU tokenization. Evaluation on CoVoST-2 (X-En) shows that our method has consistent improvement over the baseline in three metrics while being compact i.e., only half the SSS model size.