Mu2SLAM: Multitask, Multilingual Speech and Language Models

We present Mu2SLAM, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence model pre-trained jointly on un-labeled speech, unlabeled text and supervised data spanning Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR), Automatic Speech Translation (AST)and Machine Translation (MT), in over 100 languages. By leveraging a quantized representation of speech as a target, Mu2SLAM trains ona sequence-to-sequence masked denoising objective similar to T5 on both unlabeled speech and text, while utilizing the supervised tasks to improve cross-lingual and cross-modal representation alignment within the model. On CoVoSTAST, Mu2SLAM establishes a new state-of-the-art for models trained on public datasets, improv-ing on xx-en translation over the previous best by 1.9 Bleu points and on en-xx translation by 0.9 Bleu points. On Voxpopuli ASR, our model matches the performance of a mSLAM model finetuned with a RNN-T decoder, despite using a relatively weaker sequence-to-sequence architecture. On text understanding tasks, our model improves by more than 6% over mSLAM on XNLI, getting closer to the performance of mT5 models of comparable capacity on XNLI and TydiQA, paving the way towards a single model for all speech and text understanding tasks.

• Machine Intelligence

• Machine Translation