Kraken: LLM-based Speech-to-Speech Translation via Low-bitrate VQ and Dual-path Source Conditioning
Kraken speech-to-speech translation model builds on Qwen3-8B with low-bitrate vector quantization and source-conditioned vocoding.
Kraken augments a pre-trained Qwen3-8B LLM with speech feature inputs and low-bitrate single-layer vector-quantized tokens trained to reconstruct SSL features. A separate token-to-waveform decoder, Autowave-X, is conditioned on source speech to improve non-linguistic transfer. Training used 150k hours of multilingual and multitask speech data. The model reportedly beats SeamlessM4T-Large v2 and Qwen2.5-Omni in translation quality and speaker/prosody transfer.