Transformer-Encoder Trees for Efficient Multilingual Machine Translation and Speech Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Guan, Yiwen, Whitehill, Jacob
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Guan, Yiwen
Whitehill, Jacob
author_facet Guan, Yiwen
Whitehill, Jacob
contents Multilingual translation suffers from computational redundancy, especially when translating into multiple languages simultaneously. In addition, translation quality can suffer for low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce Transformer Encoder Tree (TET), a hierarchical, non-autoregressive encoder-only architecture trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) for multilingual translation. TET shares intermediate representations among linguistically similar target languages, improving accuracy on low-resource languages while reducing computational redundancy and enabling the generation of all target languages in a single forward pass. TET eliminates the sequential bottleneck of autoregressive models and supports fully parallel decoding of all tokens across all target languages. Compared to a naive one-to-many multilingual design, TET reduces the total parameter count by 66% and lowers inference computation by 60%. In speech translation, combining TET with a non-autoregressive speech recognition backbone (Wav2Vec2) shows competitive translation quality compared to autoregressive systems while speeding up inference by approximately 7-14 times.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transformer-Encoder Trees for Efficient Multilingual Machine Translation and Speech Translation
Guan, Yiwen
Whitehill, Jacob
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Multilingual translation suffers from computational redundancy, especially when translating into multiple languages simultaneously. In addition, translation quality can suffer for low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce Transformer Encoder Tree (TET), a hierarchical, non-autoregressive encoder-only architecture trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) for multilingual translation. TET shares intermediate representations among linguistically similar target languages, improving accuracy on low-resource languages while reducing computational redundancy and enabling the generation of all target languages in a single forward pass. TET eliminates the sequential bottleneck of autoregressive models and supports fully parallel decoding of all tokens across all target languages. Compared to a naive one-to-many multilingual design, TET reduces the total parameter count by 66% and lowers inference computation by 60%. In speech translation, combining TET with a non-autoregressive speech recognition backbone (Wav2Vec2) shows competitive translation quality compared to autoregressive systems while speeding up inference by approximately 7-14 times.
title Transformer-Encoder Trees for Efficient Multilingual Machine Translation and Speech Translation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17930