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Listen, Attend, Understand: a Regularization Technique for Stable E2E Speech Translation Training on High Variance labels

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End-to-End Speech Translation often shows slower convergence and worse performance when target transcriptions exhibit high variance and semantic ambiguity. We propose Listen, Attend, Understand (LAU), a semantic regularization technique that constrains the acoustic encoder's latent space during training. By leveraging frozen text embeddings to provide a directional auxiliary loss, LAU injects linguistic groundedness into the acoustic representation without increasing inference cost. We evaluate our method on a Bambara-to-French dataset with 30 hours of Bambara speech translated by non-professionals. Experimental results demonstrate that LAU models achieve comparable performance by standard metrics compared to an E2E-ST system pretrained with 100\% more data and while performing better in preserving semantic meaning. Furthermore, we introduce Total Parameter Drift as a metric to quantify the structural impact of regularization to demonstrate that semantic constraints actively reorganize the encoder's weights to prioritize meaning over literal phonetics. Our findings suggest that LAU is a robust alternative to post-hoc rescoring and a valuable addition to E2E-ST training, especially when training data is scarce and/or noisy.

Yacouba Diarra, Michael Leventhal• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Question AnsweringLLM-QA Llama-3.1-8B-based (test)
Accuracy38.34
6
Topic-based Audio ClusteringTAC (test)
Purity62.79
6
Speech Translationjeli-asr soloni-v0 (test)
WER74.51
6
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