Context-aware and Style-related Incremental Decoding framework for Discourse-Level Literary Translation

This report outlines our approach for the WMT24 Discourse-Level Literary Translation Task, focusing on the Chinese-English language pair in the Constrained Track. Translating literary texts poses significant challenges due to the nuanced meanings, idiomatic expressions, and intricate narrative structures inherent in such works. To address these challenges, we leveraged the Chinese-Llama2 model, specifically enhanced for this task through a combination of Continual Pre-training (CPT) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our methodology includes a novel Incremental Decoding framework, which ensures that each sentence is translated with consideration of its broader context, maintaining coherence and consistency throughout the text. This approach allows the model to capture long-range dependencies and stylistic elements, producing translations that faithfully preserve the original literary quality. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in both sentence-level and document-level BLEU scores, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed framework in addressing the complexities of document-level literary translation.

Machine Translation Advancements of Low-Resource Indian Languages by Transfer Learning

This paper introduces the submission by Huawei Translation Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) Shared Task. To develop a reliable machine translation system for low-resource Indian languages, we employed two distinct knowledge transfer strategies, taking into account the characteristics of the language scripts and the support available from existing open-source models for Indian languages. For Assamese(as) and Manipuri(mn), we fine-tuned the existing IndicTrans2 open-source model to enable bidirectional translation between English and these languages. For Khasi (kh) and Mizo (mz), We trained a multilingual model as a baseline using bilingual data from these four language pairs, along with an additional about 8kw English-Bengali bilingual data, all of which share certain linguistic features. This was followed by fine-tuning to achieve bidirectional translation between English and Khasi, as well as English and Mizo. Our transfer learning experiments produced impressive results: 23.5 BLEU for en-as, 31.8 BLEU for en-mn, 36.2 BLEU for as-en, and 47.9 BLEU for mn-en on their respective test sets. Similarly, the multilingual model transfer learning experiments yielded impressive outcomes, achieving 19.7 BLEU for en-kh, 32.8 BLEU for en-mz, 16.1 BLEU for kh-en, and 33.9 BLEU for mz-en on their respective test sets. These results not only highlight the effectiveness of transfer learning techniques for low-resource languages but also contribute to advancing machine translation capabilities for low-resource Indian languages.

Multilingual Transfer and Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Languages of Spain

This article introduces the submission status of the Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain task at (WMT 2024) by Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC). We participated in three translation tasks: spanish to aragonese (es-arg), spanish to aranese (es-arn), and spanish to asturian (es-ast). For these three translation tasks, we use training strategies such as multilingual transfer, regularized dropout, forward translation and back translation, labse denoising, transduction ensemble learning and other strategies to neural machine translation (NMT) model based on training deep transformer-big architecture. By using these enhancement strategies, our submission achieved a competitive result in the final evaluation.

Exploring the traditional NMT model and Large Language Model for chat translation

This paper describes the submissions of Huawei Translation Services Center(HW-TSC) to WMT24 chat translation shared task on English$\leftrightarrow$Germany (en-de) bidirection. The experiments involved fine-tuning models using chat data and exploring various strategies, including Minimum Bayesian Risk (MBR) decoding and self-training. The results show significant performance improvements in certain directions, with the MBR self-training method achieving the best results. The Large Language Model also discusses the challenges and potential avenues for further research in the field of chat translation.

LA-RAG:Enhancing LLM-based ASR Accuracy with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Recent advancements in integrating speech information into large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved automatic speech recognition (ASR) accuracy. However, existing methods often constrained by the capabilities of the speech encoders under varied acoustic conditions, such as accents. To address this, we propose LA-RAG, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm for LLM-based ASR. LA-RAG leverages fine-grained token-level speech datastores and a speech-to-speech retrieval mechanism to enhance ASR accuracy via LLM in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. Experiments on Mandarin and various Chinese dialect datasets demonstrate significant improvements in ASR accuracy compared to existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach, especially in handling accent variations.

UC-NeRF: Uncertainty-aware Conditional Neural Radiance Fields from Endoscopic Sparse Views

Visualizing surgical scenes is crucial for revealing internal anatomical structures during minimally invasive procedures. Novel View Synthesis is a vital technique that offers geometry and appearance reconstruction, enhancing understanding, planning, and decision-making in surgical scenes. Despite the impressive achievements of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), its direct application to surgical scenes produces unsatisfying results due to two challenges: endoscopic sparse views and significant photometric inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose uncertainty-aware conditional NeRF for novel view synthesis to tackle the severe shape-radiance ambiguity from sparse surgical views. The core of UC-NeRF is to incorporate the multi-view uncertainty estimation to condition the neural radiance field for modeling the severe photometric inconsistencies adaptively. Specifically, our UC-NeRF first builds a consistency learner in the form of multi-view stereo network, to establish the geometric correspondence from sparse views and generate uncertainty estimation and feature priors. In neural rendering, we design a base-adaptive NeRF network to exploit the uncertainty estimation for explicitly handling the photometric inconsistencies. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided geometry distillation is employed to enhance geometry learning. Experiments on the SCARED and Hamlyn datasets demonstrate our superior performance in rendering appearance and geometry, consistently outperforming the current state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/wrld/UC-NeRF}.

Free-SurGS: SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surgical Scene Reconstruction

Real-time 3D reconstruction of surgical scenes plays a vital role in computer-assisted surgery, holding a promise to enhance surgeons' visibility. Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have shown great potential for real-time novel view synthesis of general scenes, which relies on accurate poses and point clouds generated by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) for initialization. However, 3DGS with SfM fails to recover accurate camera poses and geometry in surgical scenes due to the challenges of minimal textures and photometric inconsistencies. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose the first SfM-free 3DGS-based method for surgical scene reconstruction by jointly optimizing the camera poses and scene representation. Based on the video continuity, the key of our method is to exploit the immediate optical flow priors to guide the projection flow derived from 3D Gaussians. Unlike most previous methods relying on photometric loss only, we formulate the pose estimation problem as minimizing the flow loss between the projection flow and optical flow. A consistency check is further introduced to filter the flow outliers by detecting the rigid and reliable points that satisfy the epipolar geometry. During 3D Gaussian optimization, we randomly sample frames to optimize the scene representations to grow the 3D Gaussian progressively. Experiments on the SCARED dataset demonstrate our superior performance over existing methods in novel view synthesis and pose estimation with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/wrld/Free-SurGS.

An End-to-End Speech Summarization Using Large Language Model

Abstractive Speech Summarization (SSum) aims to generate human-like text summaries from spoken content. It encounters difficulties in handling long speech input and capturing the intricate cross-modal mapping between long speech inputs and short text summaries. Research on large language models (LLMs) and multimodal information fusion has provided new insights for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end SSum model that utilizes Q-Former as a connector for the audio-text modality and employs LLMs to generate text summaries directly from speech features. We adopt a multi-stage training approach that includes LLM based ASR and Text Summarization (TSum) tasks as auxiliary tasks. ASR tasks are used to align feature spaces and enhance the LLM's ability to handle longer speech. Then, we utilize a curriculum learning strategy to facilitate the model's transition from TSum to SSum. Finally, our model achieves competitive performance on the How-2 dataset.

Speaker-Smoothed kNN Speaker Adaptation for End-to-End ASR

Despite recent improvements in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition (E2E ASR) systems, the performance can degrade due to vocal characteristic mismatches between training and testing data, particularly with limited target speaker adaptation data. We propose a novel speaker adaptation approach Speaker-Smoothed kNN that leverages k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) retrieval techniques to improve model output by finding correctly pronounced tokens from its pre-built datastore during the decoding phase. Moreover, we utilize x-vector to dynamically adjust kNN interpolation parameters for data sparsity issue. This approach was validated using KeSpeech and MagicData corpora under in-domain and all-domain settings. Our method consistently performs comparably to fine-tuning without the associated performance degradation during speaker changes. Furthermore, in the all-domain setting, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, reducing the CER in both single speaker and multi-speaker test scenarios.

Why Not Transform Chat Large Language Models to Non-English?

The scarcity of non-English data limits the development of non-English large language models (LLMs). Transforming English-centric LLMs to non-English has been identified as an effective and resource-efficient method. Previous works start from base LLMs and perform knowledge distillation (KD) with data generated by stronger LLMs, e.g. GPT-4. Compared to base LLMs, chat LLMs are further optimized for advanced abilities, e.g. multi-turn conversation and human preference alignment, and thus more powerful in both helpfulness and safety. However, transforming a chat LLM involves two critical issues: (1) How can we effectively transfer advanced abilities without their supervised data? (2) How can we prevent the original knowledge from catastrophic forgetting during transformation? We target these issues by introducing a simple framework called TransLLM. For the first issue, TransLLM divides the transfer problem into some common sub-tasks with the translation chain-of-thought, which uses the translation as the bridge between English and non-English step-by-step. We further enhance the performance of sub-tasks with publicly available data. For the second issue, we propose a method comprising two synergistic components: low-rank adaptation for training to maintain the original LLM parameters, and recovery KD, which utilizes data generated by the chat LLM itself to recover the original knowledge from the frozen parameters. In the experiments, we transform the LLaMA-2-chat-7B to the Thai language. Our method, using only single-turn data, outperforms strong baselines and ChatGPT on multi-turn benchmark MT-bench. Furthermore, our method, without safety data, rejects more harmful queries of safety benchmark AdvBench than both ChatGPT and GPT-4.