CKDST: Comprehensively and Effectively Distill Knowledge from Machine Translation to End-to-End Speech Translation

Yikun Lei, Zhengshan Xue, Xiaohu Zhao, Haoran Sun, Shaolin Zhu, xiaodong lin, Deyi Xiong

Findings: Machine Translation Findings Paper

Session 7: Machine Translation (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 12, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 12, Session 7 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: speech translation
TLDR: Distilling knowledge from a high-resource task, e.g., machine translation, is an effective way to alleviate the data scarcity problem of end-to-end speech translation. However, previous works simply use the classical knowledge distillation that does not allow for adequate transfer of knowledge from...
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Abstract: Distilling knowledge from a high-resource task, e.g., machine translation, is an effective way to alleviate the data scarcity problem of end-to-end speech translation. However, previous works simply use the classical knowledge distillation that does not allow for adequate transfer of knowledge from machine translation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive knowledge distillation framework for speech translation, CKDST, which is capable of comprehensively and effectively distilling knowledge from machine translation to speech translation from two perspectives: cross-modal contrastive representation distillation and simultaneous decoupled knowledge distillation. In the former, we leverage a contrastive learning objective to optmize the mutual information between speech and text representations for representation distillation in the encoder. In the later, we decouple the non-target class knowledge from target class knowledge for logits distillation in the decoder. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark dataset demonstrate that our CKDST substantially improves the baseline by 1.2 BLEU on average in all translation directions, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art end-to-end and cascaded speech translation models.