Apologies for cross-posting

We are pleased to announce the Model Compression track https://iwslt.org/2025/model-compression at IWSLT 2025 https://iwslt.org/2025/ (22nd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, in conjunction with ACL 2025 https://2025.aclweb.org/). Motivation

Text and speech foundation models have revolutionized many natural language processing tasks, including speech-to-text translation. However, their large size and high computational demands present significant challenges for real-world deployment, particularly in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices, embedded systems, and edge computing. Reducing the size of large, general-purpose models while preserving—or even enhancing—their performance in specific tasks or language settings is essential for making them more efficient, accessible, and sustainable. The Task in a Nutshell

The Model Compression track evaluates participants’ ability to apply model compression techniques to a large multilingual speech-to-text model, the need for accessibility and deployment feasibility with the requirement for good performance in speech-to-text translation. Participants are invited to apply pruning, quantization, distillation, or other compression techniques to optimize Qwen2-Audio https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B (8.2B parameters, 16GB storage) for English-German and English-Chinese speech translation. Submissions and Evaluation

Submissions under either of the two allowed data conditions (constrained or unconstrained, depending on the datasets used to support the model compression process) will be categorized into five compression bins, ranging from less than 200MB to 4GB of storage demand, and evaluated based on model size and COMET https://huggingface.co/Unbabel/wmt22-comet-da translation scores. Multiple submissions are allowed, with human evaluation conducted for the top-performing models.

Guidelines, details, and contact information

For submission guidelines and further details, please visit the IWSLT 2025 Model Compression track web page https://iwslt.org/2025/model-compression or contact us at iwslt_offline_task_submission@fbk.eu. Conference Information

IWSLT 2025 will be co-located with ACL 2025 https://2025.aclweb.org/, taking place from 31 July to 1 August 2025 in Vienna, Austria. Important Dates

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Test set release: April 1, 2025 -

Submission of system outputs: April 15, 2025 -

System description paper submission deadline: April 21, 2025 -

Camera-ready deadline: June 1, 2025 -

IWSLT conference in Vienna: July 31 – August 1, 2025

Best regards,

Matteo Negri (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) On behalf of the IWSLT 2025 Model Compression track organizers: Marco Gaido (FBK), Marco Turchi (Zoom), Sebastian Stüker (Zoom), Jan Niehues (KIT)