SimPOTrans: Self-Adaptation for Offline-to-Simultaneous Speech Translation via Reinforcement Learning

Overview & Synopsis

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) aims to translate ongoing speech with low latency while preserving translation quality. Recent studies have adopted large language models (LLMs) for SimulST and formulated it as a multi-turn dialogue task for efficient generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, existing dialogue-style SimulST approaches typically rely on specialized training schemes to acquire simultaneous translation behavior, either using synthesized read/write trajectories, which may provide suboptimal training signals, or jointly optimizing translation quality and latency, whose competing objectives may cause optimization instability. In this paper, we introduce SimPOTrans, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables offline speech translation models to self-adapt to dialogue-style SimulST. Through a simple two-stage RL post-training pipeline, SimPOTrans rewards an offline model for exhibiting translation behaviors beneficial to simultaneous scenarios when given partial speech inputs, thereby enabling offline-to-simultaneous self-adaptation without synthesized read/write trajectories or explicit latency optimization. At inference time, SimPOTrans requires no external decision policy and enables flexible quality--latency control by simply adjusting the chunk size of speech input. Experiments on the ACL 60/60 and MCIF benchmarks across three language directions (En$\rightarrow$De, En$\rightarrow$Zh, and En$\rightarrow$Ja) demonstrate that SimPOTrans outperforms several strong baselines, achieving a superior quality--latency trade-off.