{"slug": "hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared", "title": "HydraQE: OSU’s Submission for the IWSLT 2026 Speech Translation Metrics Shared Task", "summary": "Researchers at Ohio State University developed HydraQE, an end-to-end, reference-free quality estimation system for speech translation that outperforms cascaded text-based baselines. Submitted to the IWSLT 2026 shared task, HydraQE uses a Qwen3-ASR backbone with three prediction heads trained on human annotations and pseudo-labels to address data scarcity. The system demonstrates that direct speech translation quality estimation is competitive with cascaded approaches.", "body_md": "##### Abstract\n\nWe present HydraQE, our contribution to the IWSLT 2026 Speech Translation Metrics shared task. HydraQE is an end-to-end, reference-free quality estimation (QE) system for speech translation built on a Qwen3-ASR backbone, which accepts source audio and a translation hypothesis as joint input. Hidden states from all backbone layers are combined via a sparsemax scalar mix, then re-encoded by a bidirectional Transformer for full cross-modal interaction. To address the scarcity of human-annotated speech translation data, three independent prediction heads are trained on complementary supervision signals: human direct assessment (DA) annotations, MetricX-24 pseudo-labels, and xCOMET pseudo-labels. We train on a combination of synthetically corrupted examples and silver pseudo-labeled machine translation outputs, using a curriculum that begins on synthetic and silver data and gradually shifts toward human-annotated examples. HydraQE outperforms cascaded text-based baselines and prior direct speech QE systems, demonstrating that end-to-end speech translation QE is competitive with cascaded approaches.- Anthology ID:\n- 2026.iwslt-1.37\n- Volume:\n[Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026)](/volumes/2026.iwslt-1/)- Month:\n- July\n- Year:\n- 2026\n- Address:\n- San Diego, USA (in-person and online)\n- Editors:\n[Elizabeth Salesky](/people/elizabeth-salesky/),[Antonios Anastasopoulos](/people/antonios-anastasopoulos/),[Matteo Negri](/people/matteo-negri/),[Marcello Federico](/people/marcello-federico/)- Venues:\n[IWSLT](/venues/iwslt/)|[WS](/venues/ws/)- SIG:\n[SIGSLT](/sigs/sigslt/)- Publisher:\n- Association for Computational Linguistics\n- Note:\n- Pages:\n- 323–331\n- Language:\n- URL:\n[https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37/)- DOI:\n- Cite (ACL):\n- Kevin Krahn and Eric Fosler-Lussier. 2026.\n[HydraQE: OSU’s Submission for the IWSLT 2026 Speech Translation Metrics Shared Task](https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37/). In*Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2026)*, pages 323–331, San Diego, USA (in-person and online). Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite (Informal):\n[HydraQE: OSU’s Submission for the IWSLT 2026 Speech Translation Metrics Shared Task](https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37/)(Krahn & Fosler-Lussier, IWSLT 2026)- PDF:\n[https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37.pdf)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared", "canonical_source": "https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwslt-1.37/", "published_at": "2026-06-30 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-30 18:52:46.455372+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "natural-language-processing", "ai-research", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Ohio State University", "HydraQE", "Qwen3-ASR", "IWSLT 2026", "MetricX-24", "xCOMET", "Kevin Krahn", "Eric Fosler-Lussier"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hydraqe-osus-submission-for-the-iwslt-2026-speech-translation-metrics-shared.jsonld"}}