Kraken: LLM-based Speech-to-Speech Translation via Low-bitrate VQ and Dual-path Source Conditioning

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.13045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has advanced significantly with speech LLMs, offering the potential for joint optimization and preserving non-linguistic information. However, these models struggle with predicting high-bitrate speech tokens in LLMs, and face the challenge of relying on S2ST training data with ideally aligned speaker identity and prosody. We propose using low-bitrate tokens based on single-layer vector quantization, trained to re