Papers › Efficient Speech Translation through Model Compression and Knowledge Distillation

Efficient Speech Translation through Model Compression and Knowledge Distillation

26 May 2025arXiv:2505.20237archive 2025-07-28

Yasmin Moslem

Efficient deployment of large audio-language models for speech translation remains challenging due to their significant computational requirements. In this paper, we address this challenge through our system submissions to the "Model Compression" track at the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2025). We experiment with a combination of approaches including iterative layer pruning based on layer importance evaluation, low-rank adaptation with 4-bit quantization (QLoRA), and knowledge distillation. In our experiments, we use Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct for speech translation into German and Chinese. Our pruned (student) models achieve up to a 50% reduction in both model parameters and storage footprint, while retaining 97-100% of the translation quality of the in-domain (teacher) models.

PaperPDFCode

Code

ymoslem/model-compression officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Knowledge DistillationModel CompressionQuantizationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Pruning

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections