Papers for

real-time translation system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Dual-stream attention boosts real-time chinese to english translation quality

Dual-Stream Simultaneous Translation via 2D Grid Attention

Abstract: Simultaneous machine translation must generate target tokens before the source input is complete. Existing approaches address this through post-hoc read-write policies, leaving the attention mechanism unaware of bidirectional stream dependencies. We propose a dual-stream attention framework that represents source and target streams as a two-dimensional grid of hidden states and models their interaction through four structurally distinct attention types merged via joint QK Softmax normalization. Two approximations---broadcast and Hadamard---reduce the per-layer complexity from O(X^2Y+XY^2) to O(X^2+Y^2+XY) with provably decaying error. Training uses a self-guided loop: a per-cell loss heatmap drives dynamic-programming path recovery, which generates read/write decision supervision labels without external alignment. An incremental KV cache with anchored rotary position embeddings enables efficient streaming inference. On Chinese-to-English simultaneous translation, the proposed model outperforms the Wait-k baseline by +5.66 BLEURT and +10.36 COMET at comparable latency, and surpasses the non-streaming reference on COMET at a fraction of the response delay.

Mon 28 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Simultaneous translation means starting to translate before hearing the whole sentence. The authors designed a new method that looks at both source and target sentences together in a grid, allowing the system to better understand how pieces from each relate as translation happens. This method makes translation more accurate and faster by learning when to read or write without needing extra guidance. They tested it on Chinese to English translation and found it did better than previous methods while keeping the delay very low.
Open → 2609.34902v1