RESEARCH

NLP

Efficient Wait-k Models for Simultaneous Machine Translation

November 03, 2020

Abstract

Simultaneous machine translation consists in starting output generation before the entire input sequence is available. Wait-k decoders offer a simple but efficient approach for this problem. They first read k source tokens, after which they alternate between producing a target token and reading another source token. We investigate the behavior of wait-k decoding in low resource settings for spoken corpora using IWSLT datasets. We improve training of these models using unidirectional encoders, and training across multiple values of k. Experiments with Transformer and 2D-convolutional architectures show that our wait-k models generalize well across a wide range of latency levels. We also show that the 2D-convolution architecture is competitive with Transformers for simultaneous translation of spoken language.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Jakob Verbeek

Laurent Besacier

Maha Elbayad

Publisher

InterSpeech

Related Publications

June 13, 2025

FAIRNESS

INTEGRITY

Measuring multi-calibration

Ido Guy, Daniel Haimovich, Fridolin Linder, Nastaran Okati, Lorenzo Perini, Niek Tax, Mark Tygert

June 13, 2025

June 11, 2025

RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments

Florian Bordes, Quentin Garrido, Justine Kao, Adina Williams, Mike Rabbat, Emmanuel Dupoux

June 11, 2025

June 11, 2025

RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs

Benno Krojer, Mojtaba Komeili, Candace Ross, Quentin Garrido, Koustuv Sinha, Nicolas Ballas, Mido Assran

June 11, 2025

June 11, 2025

ROBOTICS

RESEARCH

V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning

Mido Assran, Adrien Bardes, David Fan, Quentin Garrido, Russell Howes, Mojtaba Komeili, Matthew Muckley, Ammar Rizvi, Claire Roberts, Koustuv Sinha, Artem Zholus, Sergio Arnaud, Abha Gejji, Ada Martin, Francois Robert Hogan, Daniel Dugas, Piotr Bojanowski, Vasil Khalidov, Patrick Labatut, Francisco Massa, Marc Szafraniec, Kapil Krishnakumar, Yong Li, Xiaodong Ma, Sarath Chandar, Franziska Meier, Yann LeCun, Michael Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas

June 11, 2025

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.