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Main Authors: Du, Yexing, Pan, Youcheng, Wang, Zekun, Chu, Zheng, Huang, Yichong, Liu, Kaiyuan, Yang, Bo, Xiang, Yang, Liu, Ming, Qin, Bing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21646
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author Du, Yexing
Pan, Youcheng
Wang, Zekun
Chu, Zheng
Huang, Yichong
Liu, Kaiyuan
Yang, Bo
Xiang, Yang
Liu, Ming
Qin, Bing
author_facet Du, Yexing
Pan, Youcheng
Wang, Zekun
Chu, Zheng
Huang, Yichong
Liu, Kaiyuan
Yang, Bo
Xiang, Yang
Liu, Ming
Qin, Bing
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable success in enhancing translation performance by integrating multimodal information. However, existing research primarily focuses on image-guided methods, whose applicability is constrained by the scarcity of multilingual image-text pairs. The speech modality overcomes this limitation due to its natural alignment with text and the abundance of existing speech datasets, which enable scalable language coverage. In this paper, we propose a Speech-guided Machine Translation (SMT) framework that integrates speech and text as fused inputs into an MLLM to improve translation quality. To mitigate reliance on low-resource data, we introduce a Self-Evolution Mechanism. The core components of this framework include a text-to-speech model, responsible for generating synthetic speech, and an MLLM capable of classifying synthetic speech samples and iteratively optimizing itself using positive samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework surpasses all existing methods on the Multi30K multimodal machine translation benchmark, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, on general machine translation datasets, particularly the FLORES-200, it achieves average state-of-the-art performance in 108 translation directions. Ablation studies on CoVoST-2 confirms that differences between synthetic and authentic speech have negligible impact on translation quality. The code and models are released at https://github.com/yxduir/LLM-SRT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_21646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation with Speech-Text Fusion
Du, Yexing
Pan, Youcheng
Wang, Zekun
Chu, Zheng
Huang, Yichong
Liu, Kaiyuan
Yang, Bo
Xiang, Yang
Liu, Ming
Qin, Bing
Computation and Language
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable success in enhancing translation performance by integrating multimodal information. However, existing research primarily focuses on image-guided methods, whose applicability is constrained by the scarcity of multilingual image-text pairs. The speech modality overcomes this limitation due to its natural alignment with text and the abundance of existing speech datasets, which enable scalable language coverage. In this paper, we propose a Speech-guided Machine Translation (SMT) framework that integrates speech and text as fused inputs into an MLLM to improve translation quality. To mitigate reliance on low-resource data, we introduce a Self-Evolution Mechanism. The core components of this framework include a text-to-speech model, responsible for generating synthetic speech, and an MLLM capable of classifying synthetic speech samples and iteratively optimizing itself using positive samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework surpasses all existing methods on the Multi30K multimodal machine translation benchmark, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, on general machine translation datasets, particularly the FLORES-200, it achieves average state-of-the-art performance in 108 translation directions. Ablation studies on CoVoST-2 confirms that differences between synthetic and authentic speech have negligible impact on translation quality. The code and models are released at https://github.com/yxduir/LLM-SRT.
title Scalable Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation with Speech-Text Fusion
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21646