S2ST-Omni: Hierarchical Language-Aware SpeechLLM Adaptation for Multilingual Speech-to-Speech Translation

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7977 Authors

Keywords: Speech-to-speech translation, SpeechLLM, hybrid adapter, hierarchical language-aware architecture, progressive fine-tuning

Abstract: Despite recent advances in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), it remains difficult to achieve both high translation accuracy and practical flexibility. In this paper, we present S2ST-Omni, a compositional S2ST framework that integrates a high-accuracy speech-to-text translation (S2TT) frontend with a modular, plug-and-play text-to-speech (TTS) backend, enabling independent optimization of translation and synthesis. On the S2TT side, we introduce a hybrid adapter that follows a "local-then-global" strategy to bridge the pretrained Whisper encoder and Qwen3 LLM, yielding a hierarchical acoustic-to-semantic abstraction. Building on this bridge, we further propose a hierarchical language-aware architecture that injects source-language information at two complementary levels. At the acoustic level, Language-Aware Dual-CTC operates on intermediate adapter features and employs FiLM-style feature modulation with a learnable gate, encouraging the model to learn language-specific but content-faithful acoustic representations. At the linguistic level, Language-Aware Prompting dynamically constructs source-language-conditioned prompts that activate language-specific translation knowledge in the LLM. To enable efficient optimization, we design a task-specific progressive fine-tuning strategy that first stabilizes speech-text alignment and then improves translation via LoRA on top of this converged foundation. The TTS backend remains fully modular and can be instantiated with any state-of-the-art synthesizer without retraining the S2TT frontend. Experiments on CVSS-C show that S2ST-Omni consistently achieves the best BLEU and ASR-BLEU across French, German, and Spanish to English directions, outperforming strong recent S2ST baselines.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Special Theme (conference specific)

Research Area Keywords: speech translation, multilingual MT, multimodality, cross-modal machine translation, spoken language translation

Languages Studied: english, spanish, german, french

Submission Number: 7977