Gradient-Informed Training for Low-Resource Multilingual Speech Translation

Abstract

In low-resource multilingual speech-to-text translation, uniform architectural sharing across languages frequently introduces representation conflicts that impede convergence. This work proposes a principled methodology to automatically determine layer-specific sharing patterns by mining training gradient information. Our approach employs three distinct analysis strategies: distance-based language clustering, self/cross-task divergence metrics for capacity allocation, and joint factorization coupled with canonical correlation analysis for subspace alignment. Extensive evaluation across four language pairs (using the SeamlessM4T-Medium architecture) demonstrates persistent improvements in translation quality metrics.