Agent-SiMT: Agent-Assisted Simultaneous Translation With Large Language Models

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) generates target translations in real-time while reading the source sentence. It relies on a policy to determine the optimal timing for producing translations, aiming to achieve both low response latency and high translation quality. Existing SiMT methods typically utilize the traditional Transformer architecture, employing complicated dynamic programming algorithms to jointly optimize policy decisions and translation generation. While these methods excel at determining policies, their translation capabilities are suboptimal. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive corpora, exhibit exceptional generation capabilities but struggle to learn translation policies through traditional Transformer-based training methods. To address these limitations, we introduce Agent-SiMT, a novel framework combining the strengths of LLMs and traditional SiMT methods. Agent-SiMT contains a policy-decision agent and a translation agent. The policy-decision agent is managed by a SiMT model, which determines the policy using partial source sentences and translations. The translation agent, powered by an LLM, generates the target translation according to the policy decisions. These two agents work collaboratively to perform SiMT. Experiments demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance.