SalamandraTAV-7b is a Speech To Text translation Speech LLM that has been finetuned from salamandraTA-7b-instruct.
SalamandraTAV-7b is proficient in 6 Iberic languages plus English, and supports the following translation-related tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Text To Text Translation, Speech To Text Translation, Spoken Language Identification.
[!WARNING]
DISCLAIMER: This version of Salamandra is tailored exclusively for speech translation tasks. It lacks chat capabilities and has not been trained with any chat instructions.
SalamandraTAV-7b is a finetuned version of salamandraTA-7b-instruct using mhubert-base-25hz as the speech encoder. It has been trained on 12,000 hours of Automatic Speech Recognition, 900 hours of Speech-To-Text Translation data and 113M target tokens of Text-To-Text Translation to mantain the original model's performance.
Intended Use
The model is intended for both research and commercial use for the speech to text translation task in the following languages: Asturian, Basque, Catalan, English, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish.
Hardware and Software
Training Framework
The code used to train SalamandraTAV-7b is based on the Transformers library, and will be publicly available soon.
Training was conducted on 4 nodes, each with the following specifications:
4x Nvidia Hopper GPUs with 64GB HBM2 memory
2x Intel Sapphire Rapids 8460Y+ at 2.3Ghz and 32c each (64 cores)
4x NDR200 (BW per node 800Gb/s)
512 GB of Main memory (DDR5)
How to use
[!NOTE] Requirements
To use this model, ensure you have the following Python packages installed: transformers, torch, torchaudio, joblib, sentencepiece, protobuf, scikit-learn, langcodes, soundfile
The easiest way to use the model is using the custom pipeline multimodal_mt:
WER: jiwer implementation. Applied the following normalization:
python
1defnormalize_text_list(text_list: List[str])-> List[str]:2 normalized_list =[]3for t in text_list:4# Apostrophes and quotation marks5 t = t.replace("’","'").replace("‘","'").replace("`","'")6 t = t.replace("“",'"').replace("”",'"')7# Hyphens8 t = t.replace("–","-").replace("—","-")9# Ellipses10 t = t.replace("…","...")11# Non-breaking spaces12 t = t.replace("\u00A0"," ")13 normalized_list.append(t)14return normalized_list
15transformation = jiwer.Compose([16 normalize_text_list,17 jiwer.ToLowerCase(),18 jiwer.ExpandCommonEnglishContractions(),19 jiwer.RemovePunctuation(),20 jiwer.RemoveWhiteSpace(replace_by_space=True),21 jiwer.RemoveMultipleSpaces(),22 jiwer.Strip(),23 jiwer.ReduceToSingleSentence(),24 jiwer.ReduceToListOfListOfWords()25])
Speech-To-Text Translation
Results reported in bold indicate better performance than SeamlessM4T. The heatmap matrices indicate the difference in scores of each language direction.
Fleurs Test
Fleurs Test
BLEU
SalamandraTAV
ast
ca
en
es
gl
pt
Avg (tgt)
ast
-
26.4
27.7
17.1
19.7
21.6
22.5
ca
22.9
-
39.7
22.2
29.8
31.0
29.1
en
24.3
39.1
-
25.5
32.3
43.0
32.8
es
13.7
20.8
24.8
-
18.8
19.1
19.4
gl
18.1
29.4
32.4
20.6
-
26.0
25.3
pt
19.9
30.6
37.0
20.6
25.6
-
26.7
Avg (src)
19.8
29.3
32.3
21.2
25.2
28.1
26.0
SalamandraTAV vs SeamlessM4T BLEU Difference
The evaluation results reported here were obtained by manually running inference with the model on the test set. We verified that the results from SeamlessM4T are consistent with the official results reported by the authors.
XCOMET-XL
SalamandraTAV
ca
en
es
gl
pt
Avg (tgt)
ca
-
0.9289
0.9114
0.9202
0.9136
0.9185
en
0.8987
-
0.9045
0.8981
0.9077
0.9023
es
0.9013
0.9257
-
0.9162
0.9110
0.9136
gl
0.8930
0.9024
0.8890
-
0.9005
0.8962
pt
0.8697
0.8912
0.8775
0.8862
-
0.8812
Avg (src)
0.8907
0.9121
0.8956
0.9052
0.9082
0.9023
SalamandraTAV vs SeamlessM4T XCOMET-XL Difference
XCOMET-XL results for Asturian are not reported because it is not supported by this metric.
CoVoST 2 Test
CoVoST 2 Test
BLEU
SalamandraTAV
ca
en
ca
-
37.3
en
41.1
-
es
-
43.9
pt
-
49.0
Avg (src)
41.1
43.4
SalamandraTAV vs SeamlessM4T BLEU Difference
XCOMET-XL
SalamandraTAV
ca
en
ca
-
0.8835
en
0.8454
-
es
-
0.9241
pt
-
0.8967
Avg (src)
0.8454
0.9014
SalamandraTAV vs SeamlessM4T XCOMET-XL Difference
Mintzai-ST Test
Mintzai-ST Test
Mintzai-ST has overlap with basque_parliament_1, with which we have trained our model.
For further information, please send an email to bsc-lt@bsc.es.
Copyright
Copyright(c) 2025 by Language Technologies Lab, Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Funding
This work is funded by the Ministerio para la Transformación Digital y de la Función Pública - Funded by EU – NextGenerationEU within the framework of the project Modelos del Lenguaje.
Acknowledgements
The author thankfully acknowledges the computer resources at MareNostrum and the technical support provided by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (RES-IM-2025-2-0027).
Disclaimer
Be aware that the model may contain biases or other unintended distortions.
When third parties deploy systems or provide services based on this model, or use the model themselves,
they bear the responsibility for mitigating any associated risks and ensuring compliance with applicable regulations,
including those governing the use of Artificial Intelligence.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, as the owner and creator of the model, shall not be held liable for any outcomes resulting from third-party use.
If you find our model useful, we would appreciate if you could cite our work as follows:
@misc{bsclt2025salamandraTAV7b ,
title={salamandra-TAV-7b: a Speech-To-Text Translation model based on an end-to-end Speech LLM for Iberian Languages.},
author={SalamandraTAV Team},
organization={Barcelona Supercomputing Center},
url={https://huggingface.co/langtech-veu/salamandra-TAV-7b},
year={2025}
}