# TransVIP: Speech to Speech Translation System with Voice and Isochrony Preservation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [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)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13438/) (2022)
- [AudioLM: a Language Modeling Approach to Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03143/) (2022)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [High-Fidelity Audio Compression with Improved RVQGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06546/) (2023)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [AudioPaLM: A Large Language Model That Can Speak and Listen](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12925/) (2023)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [Google USM: Scaling Automatic Speech Recognition Beyond 100 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01037/) (2023)
- [NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03100/) (2024)
- [Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05187/) (2023)
- [SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07205/) (2021)
- [Speak, Read and Prompt: High-Fidelity Text-to-Speech with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03540/) (2023)
- [Speak Foreign Languages with Your Own Voice: Cross-Lingual Neural Codec Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03926/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning with Random-projection Quantizer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01855/) (2022)
- [Direct speech-to-speech translation with discrete units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05604/) (2021)
- [Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16502/) (2022)
- [SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11596/) (2023)
- [Text-Free Prosody-Aware Generative Spoken Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03264/) (2021)
- [VioLA: Unified Codec Language Models for Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16107/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Step-Audio 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16632/) (2025)
- [UniSS: Unified Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation with Your Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21144/) (2025)
- [Direct Speech-to-Speech Neural Machine Translation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14453/) (2024)
- [SimulS2S-LLM: Unlocking Simultaneous Inference of Speech LLMs for Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15509/) (2025)
- [Dub-S2ST: Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation for Seamless Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20899/) (2025)
- [StressTransfer: Stress-Aware Speech-to-Speech Translation with Emphasis Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13194/) (2025)
- [STEB: A Speech-to-Speech Translation Expressiveness Benchmark for Evaluating Beyond Translation Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25529/) (2026)
- [Isochrony-Controlled Speech-to-Text Translation: A study on translating from Sino-Tibetan to Indo-European Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07387/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Speech-to-Speech Translation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03241/) (2026)
- [DuraS2ST: Chain-of-Thought and Reinforcement Learning for Duration-Aligned Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33742/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a rising interest and trend in research towards directly translating speech from one language to another, known as end-to-end speech-to-speech translation. However, most end-to-end models struggle to outperform cascade models, i.e., a pipeline framework by concatenating speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech models. The primary challenges stem from the inherent complexities involved in direct translation tasks and the scarcity of data. In this study, we introduce a novel model framework TransVIP that leverages diverse datasets in a cascade fashion yet facilitates end-to-end inference through joint probability. Furthermore, we propose two separated encoders to preserve the speaker's voice characteristics and isochrony from the source speech during the translation process, making it highly suitable for scenarios such as video dubbing. Our experiments on the French-English language pair demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art speech-to-speech translation model.
