AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models

While the automatic evaluation of omni-modal large models (OLMs) is essential, assessing empathy remains a significant challenge due to its inherent affectivity. To investigate this challenge, we introduce AEQ-Bench (Audio Empathy Quotient Benchmark), a novel benchmark to systematically assess two core empathetic capabilities of OLMs: (i) generating empathetic responses by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs (audio + text), and (ii) judging the empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. Compared to existing benchmarks, AEQ-Bench incorporates two novel settings that vary in context specificity and speech tone. Comprehensive assessment across linguistic and paralinguistic metrics reveals that (1) OLMs trained with audio output capabilities generally outperformed models with text-only outputs, and (2) while OLMs align with human judgments for coarse-grained quality assessment, they remain unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness.

PsFuture: A Pseudo-Future-based Zero-Shot Adaptive Policy for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) requires target tokens to be generated in real-time as streaming source tokens are consumed. Traditional approaches to SiMT typically require sophisticated architectures and extensive parameter configurations for training adaptive read/write policies, which in turn demand considerable computational power and memory. We propose PsFuture, the first zero-shot adaptive read/write policy for SiMT, enabling the translation model to independently determine read/write actions without the necessity for additional training. Furthermore, we introduce a novel training strategy, Prefix-to-Full (P2F), specifically tailored to adjust offline translation models for SiMT applications, exploiting the advantages of the bidirectional attention mechanism inherent in offline models. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot policy attains performance on par with strong baselines and the P2F method can further enhance performance, achieving an outstanding trade-off between translation quality and latency.

Adaptive Policy with Wait-$k$ Model for Simultaneous Translation

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) requires a robust read/write policy in conjunction with a high-quality translation model. Traditional methods rely on either a fixed wait-$k$ policy coupled with a standalone wait-$k$ translation model, or an adaptive policy jointly trained with the translation model. In this study, we propose a more flexible approach by decoupling the adaptive policy model from the translation model. Our motivation stems from the observation that a standalone multi-path wait-$k$ model performs competitively with adaptive policies utilized in state-of-the-art SiMT approaches. Specifically, we introduce DaP, a divergence-based adaptive policy, that makes read/write decisions for any translation model based on the potential divergence in translation distributions resulting from future information. DaP extends a frozen wait-$k$ model with lightweight parameters, and is both memory and computation efficient. Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that our approach offers an improved trade-off between translation accuracy and latency, outperforming strong baselines.