# SimulSense: Sense-Driven Interpreting for Efficient Simultaneous Speech Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21932/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [SimulMT to SimulST: Adapting Simultaneous Text Translation to End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02048/) (2020)
- [CIF: Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11235/) (2019)
- [CoVoST: A Diverse Multilingual Speech-To-Text Translation Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01320/) (2020)
- [Over-Generation Cannot Be Rewarded: Length-Adaptive Average Lagging for Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05807/) (2022)
- [Low-Latency Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition and Translation by Partial Hypothesis Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11185/) (2020)
- [RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04833/) (2021)
- [AlignAtt: Using Attention-based Audio-Translation Alignments as a Guide for Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11408/) (2023)
- [Learning When to Translate for Streaming Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07368/) (2021)
- [Exploring Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09595/) (2022)
- [Towards Achieving Human Parity on End-to-end Simultaneous Speech Translation via LLM Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21646/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation with Fully Unidirectional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11809/) (2025)
- [Improving the fusion of acoustic and text representations in RNN-T](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10240/) (2022)
- [InfiniSST: Simultaneous Translation of Unbounded Speech with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02969/) (2025)
- [CIF-T: A Novel CIF-based Transducer Architecture for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14132/) (2023)
- [Label-Synchronous Neural Transducer for E2E Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04541/) (2024)
- [Conversational SimulMT: Efficient Simultaneous Translation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10552/) (2024)
- [SimulS2S-LLM: Unlocking Simultaneous Inference of Speech LLMs for Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15509/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How to make human-interpreter-like read/write decisions for simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems? Current state-of-the-art systems formulate SimulST as a multi-turn dialogue task, requiring specialized interleaved training data and relying on computationally expensive large language model (LLM) inference for decision-making. In this paper, we propose SimulSense, a novel framework for SimulST that mimics human interpreters by continuously reading input speech and triggering write decisions to produce translation when a new sense unit is perceived. Experiments against two state-of-the-art baseline systems demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a superior quality-latency tradeoff and substantially improved real-time efficiency, where its decision-making is up to 9.6x faster than the baselines.
