# MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17255/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [WhisperX: Time-Accurate Speech Transcription of Long-Form Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00747/) (2023)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02437/) (2022)
- [SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments without Parallel Training Data using Static and Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08728/) (2020)
- [Truncation Sampling as Language Model Desmoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15191/) (2022)
- [Correcting Length Bias in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10006/) (2018)
- [BM25S: Orders of magnitude faster lexical search via eager sparse scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03618/) (2024)
- [Canary-1B-v2 & Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3: Efficient and High-Performance Models for Multilingual ASR and AST](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14128/) (2025)
- [Epsilon Sampling Rocks: Investigating Sampling Strategies for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09860/) (2023)
- [Low-Latency Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition and Translation by Partial Hypothesis Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11185/) (2020)
- [Tower+: Bridging Generality and Translation Specialization in Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17080/) (2025)
- [TransLLaMa: LLM-based Simultaneous Translation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04636/) (2024)
- [CUNI-KIT System for Simultaneous Speech Translation Task at IWSLT 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06028/) (2022)
- [Re-Translation Strategies For Long Form, Simultaneous, Spoken Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03393/) (2019)
- [Open ASR Leaderboard: Towards Reproducible and Transparent Multilingual and Long-Form Speech Recognition Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06961/) (2025)
- [Linear-time Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Reference Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04251/) (2024)
- [MCIF: Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction-Following Benchmark from Scientific Talks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19634/) (2025)
- [mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04167/) (2024)
- [Simultaneous Masking, Not Prompting Optimization: A Paradigm Shift in Fine-tuning LLMs for Simultaneous Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10443/) (2024)
- [LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13476/) (2024)
- [MT Metrics Correlate with Human Ratings of Simultaneous Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08633/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Translation with Offline Speech and LLM Models in CUNI Submission to IWSLT 2025](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17077/) (2025)
- [xCOMET-lite: Bridging the Gap Between Efficiency and Quality in Learned MT Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14553/) (2024)
- [Hearing to Translate: The Effectiveness of Speech Modality Integration into LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16378/) (2025)
- [Pushing the Limits of Beam Search Decoding for Transducer-based ASR models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00185/) (2025)
- [TurboBias: Universal ASR Context-Biasing powered by GPU-accelerated Phrase-Boosting Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07014/) (2025)
- [Better Late Than Never: Meta-Evaluation of Latency Metrics for Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17349/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track. Our submission utilizes the recently released Parakeet and Qwen 3.5 models to create a robust, cascaded solution for long-form SimulST through the use of adaptive "black-box" policies. We explore relaxations of these policies to achieve better quality-latency trade-offs. Compared to last year, we participate on all language directions. In addition to this, for the EnrightarrowDe, It, Zh directions we also participate in this year's new context track employing a combination of ASR word-boosting and a RAG mechanism of offline pre-translated exemplars to guide generation and enrich our system with domain-specific context. Finally, we provide a detailed latency analysis of our system. Compared to last year, results on the MCIF EnrightarrowDe test set shows a substantial quality improvement of +5.82 XCOMET-XL. Our context track processing further improves performance by +1.03.