English

SimulU: Training-free Policy for Long-form Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Audio and Speech Processing 2026-03-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation (SimulS2S) is essential for real-time multilingual communication, with increasing integration into meeting and streaming platforms. Despite this, SimulS2S remains underexplored in research, where current solutions often rely on resource-intensive training procedures and operate on short-form, pre-segmented utterances, failing to generalize to continuous speech. To bridge this gap, we propose SimulU, the first training-free policy for long-form SimulS2S. SimulU adopts history management and speech output selection strategies that exploit cross-attention in pre-trained end-to-end models to regulate both input history and output generation. Evaluations on MuST-C across 8 languages show that SimulU achieves a better or comparable quality-latency trade-off against strong cascaded models. By eliminating the need for ad-hoc training, SimulU offers a promising path to end-to-end SimulS2S in realistic, long-form scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.16924,
  title  = {SimulU: Training-free Policy for Long-form Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation},
  author = {Amirbek Djanibekov and Luisa Bentivogli and Matteo Negri and Sara Papi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16924},
  year   = {2026}
}