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SeamlessM4T: Massively Multilingual & Multimodal Machine Translation

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arxiv 2308.11596 v3 pith:SCYRTUYV submitted 2023-08-22 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords translationspeechseamlessm4tlanguagesspeech-to-speechspeech-to-textmodelssystems
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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What does it take to create the Babel Fish, a tool that can help individuals translate speech between any two languages? While recent breakthroughs in text-based models have pushed machine translation coverage beyond 200 languages, unified speech-to-speech translation models have yet to achieve similar strides. More specifically, conventional speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded systems that perform translation progressively, putting high-performing unified systems out of reach. To address these gaps, we introduce SeamlessM4T, a single model that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and automatic speech recognition for up to 100 languages. To build this, we used 1 million hours of open speech audio data to learn self-supervised speech representations with w2v-BERT 2.0. Subsequently, we created a multimodal corpus of automatically aligned speech translations. Filtered and combined with human-labeled and pseudo-labeled data, we developed the first multilingual system capable of translating from and into English for both speech and text. On FLEURS, SeamlessM4T sets a new standard for translations into multiple target languages, achieving an improvement of 20% BLEU over the previous SOTA in direct speech-to-text translation. Compared to strong cascaded models, SeamlessM4T improves the quality of into-English translation by 1.3 BLEU points in speech-to-text and by 2.6 ASR-BLEU points in speech-to-speech. Tested for robustness, our system performs better against background noises and speaker variations in speech-to-text tasks compared to the current SOTA model. Critically, we evaluated SeamlessM4T on gender bias and added toxicity to assess translation safety. Finally, all contributions in this work are open-sourced and accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/seamless_communication

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Cited by 34 Pith papers

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  2. SimulS2ST-Omni: Data-Efficient Streaming Speech-to-Speech Translation via Explicit Trajectory Supervision

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  3. When to Use Extra Context: Evidence-Grounded Terminology Adaptation for Simultaneous Speech Translation

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  4. Bridging the Stability-Expressivity Gap: Synthetic Data Scaling and Preference Alignment for Low-Resource Spoken Language Models

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  5. Frequency-Guided Deformable Networks for Continuous Phase Alignment

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  6. Cross-Attention is Half Explanation in Speech-to-Text Models

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  8. Data Quality Issues in Multilingual Speech Datasets: The Need for Sociolinguistic Awareness and Proactive Language Planning

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

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  11. Multimodal Zero-Shot Framework for Deepfake Hate Speech Detection in Low-Resource Languages

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  12. Different Speech Translation Models Encode and Translate Speaker Gender Differently

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  13. NAVER LABS Europe Submission to the Instruction-following Track

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  18. OWLS: Scaling Laws for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation Models

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  19. Breaking the Curse of Multilinguality in Many-to-Many Speech-to-Text Translation via a Resource-Aware Mixture of Speech Encoders

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  21. Multimodal Large Language Model-Enabled Video Translation: A Role-Oriented Survey

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  24. Seamless Dysfluent Speech Text Alignment for Disordered Speech Analysis

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  25. TESU-LLM: Training Speech-LLMs Without Speech via Unified Encoder Alignment

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    TESU-LLM shows that a frozen LLM can answer spoken queries after training only a 13M-parameter projector on text, using SeamlessM4T's shared speech-text encoder.

  26. Continual Learning Beyond Experience Rehearsal and Full Model Surrogates

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  27. Selective Invocation for Multilingual ASR: A Cost-effective Approach Adapting to Speech Recognition Difficulty

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  31. IIITH-BUT system for IWSLT 2025 low-resource Bhojpuri to Hindi speech translation

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  34. TransBench: Benchmarking Machine Translation for Industrial-Scale Applications

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