# Textless Acoustic Model with Self-Supervised Distillation for Noise-Robust Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02733 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02733/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [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)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [Towards End-to-End Prosody Transfer for Expressive Speech Synthesis with Tacotron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09047/) (2018)
- [Direct speech-to-speech translation with discrete units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05604/) (2021)
- [VoxLingua107: a Dataset for Spoken Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12998/) (2020)
- [Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08352/) (2021)
- [Direct speech-to-speech translation with a sequence-to-sequence model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06037/) (2019)
- [MetricGAN+: An Improved Version of MetricGAN for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03538/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Generative Modeling for Controllable Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07217/) (2018)
- [Proactive Detection of Voice Cloning with Localized Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17264/) (2024)
- [ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11510/) (2023)
- [UnitY: Two-pass Direct Speech-to-speech Translation with Discrete Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08055/) (2022)
- [Speech-to-Speech Translation For A Real-world Unwritten Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06474/) (2022)
- [PoCoNet: Better Speech Enhancement with Frequency-Positional Embeddings, Semi-Supervised Conversational Data, and Biased Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04470/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [How "Real" is Your Real-Time Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation System?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18495/) (2024)
- [UniSS: Unified Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation with Your Voice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21144/) (2025)
- [PAST: Phonetic-Acoustic Speech Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14470/) (2025)
- [DiEmo-TTS: Disentangled Emotion Representations via Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Speaker Emotion Transfer in Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19687/) (2025)
- [STEB: A Speech-to-Speech Translation Expressiveness Benchmark for Evaluating Beyond Translation Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25529/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a textless acoustic model with a self-supervised distillation strategy for noise-robust expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). Recently proposed expressive S2ST systems have achieved impressive expressivity preservation performances by cascading unit-to-speech (U2S) generator to the speech-to-unit translation model. However, these systems are vulnerable to the presence of noise in input speech, which is an assumption in real-world translation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a U2S generator that incorporates a distillation with no label (DINO) self-supervised training strategy into it's pretraining process. Because the proposed method captures noise-agnostic expressivity representation, it can generate qualified speech even in noisy environment. Objective and subjective evaluation results verified that the proposed method significantly improved the performance of the expressive S2ST system in noisy environments while maintaining competitive performance in clean environments.