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arXiv · 2106.01463

Lightweight Adapter Tuning for Multilingual Speech Translation

Hang Le·Juan Pino·Changhan Wang·Jiatao Gu·Didier Schwab·Laurent Besacier
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Abstract

Adapter modules were recently introduced as an efficient alternative to fine-tuning in NLP. Adapter tuning consists in freezing pretrained parameters of a model and injecting lightweight modules between layers, resulting in the addition of only a small number of task-specific trainable parameters. While adapter tuning was investigated for multilingual neural machine translation, this paper proposes a comprehensive analysis of adapters for multilingual speech translation (ST). Starting from different pre-trained models (a multilingual ST trained on parallel data or a multilingual BART (mBART) trained on non-parallel multilingual data), we show that adapters can be used to: (a) efficiently specialize ST to specific language pairs with a low extra cost in terms of parameters, and (b) transfer from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) task and an mBART pre-trained model to a multilingual ST task. Experiments show that adapter tuning offer competitive results to full fine-tuning, while being much more parameter-efficient.

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Hang Le, Juan Pino, Changhan Wang, Jiatao Gu, Didier Schwab, Laurent Besacier. 2021-06-02. Lightweight Adapter Tuning for Multilingual Speech Translation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01463

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