Exploring Continuous Integrate-and-Fire for Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation

Abstract: Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is a challenging task aiming to translate streaming speech before the complete input is observed. A SimulST system generally includes two components: the pre-decision that aggregates the speech information and the policy that decides to read or write. While recent works had proposed various strategies to improve the pre-decision, they mainly adopt the fixed wait-k policy, leaving the adaptive policies rarely explored. This paper proposes to model the adaptive policy by adapting the Continuous Integrate-and-Fire (CIF). Compared with monotonic multihead attention (MMA), our method has the advantage of simpler computation, superior quality at low latency, and better generalization to long utterances. We conduct experiments on the MuST-C V2 dataset and show the effectiveness of our approach.