arXiv AI

Translation as a Decision Space: A Multi-Agent Perspective on Low-Resource Dialect Generation

The paper proposes treating translation as a structured decision space explored by multiple autonomous agents, rather than producing a single output. Using Turkish–Syrian Arabic dialogue, three agents—zero‑shot, dialect‑stabilized, and pivot translation—are compared on 5,000 sentences, with stabilization nearly doubling dialect marker usage and reducing structural instability. The study introduces an interpretability framework that quantifies decision flexibility through dialect marker frequency, lexical proximity, and structural variance.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

One Model to Translate Them All? A Journey to Mount Doom for Multilingual Model Merging

The paper investigates weight‑space merging of independently fine‑tuned multilingual machine translation models. Experiments show that merging is more successful when models share a target language, yet it still cannot match the peak performance of language‑specific checkpoints. When target languages differ, performance drops sharply, and analysis reveals that overlapping neuron activation and incompatible upper‑layer geometries cause these failures.

By Baban Gain, Trilok Nath Singh, Asif Ekbal
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translation

arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.

By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 6

Different Perturbations, Different Mechanisms: Understanding Continued Pre-training for Zero-Shot Dialect Robustness

Dialectal variation remains a major challenge for multilingual language models. Perturbation-based continued pre-training (CPT) has emerged as a promising approach to improving robustness, yet existing work largely evaluates individual perturbation strategies in isolation and provides limited insight into why they work.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Terminal-Bench-LILT: Multilingual Agentic Coding Benchmark Grounded in Language, Region, and Culture

arXiv:2608.28641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most evaluations for coding agents are conducted exclusively in English, which does not reflect real-world multilingual deployment. We present Termin...

By Yunsu Kim, Kaden Uhlig, Ashwin Purohit, Milind Agarwal, Patrick Simianer, Anil Arslan, Kiarash Mokhtari, Thomas Zenkel, Johannes Mosig, Gabriel Bretschner, Shamik Bose, Joern Wuebker, John DeNero
arXiv AI
Sep 2

The Interlingua Hypothesis: LLMs Translate via a Latent Task-agnostic Feature Space

The paper proposes the interlingua hypothesis, suggesting that large language models translate by encoding a source sentence into a latent, task‑agnostic feature space and then decoding a target sentence from that space. Three lines of evidence support this: (1) BLEU variance across language pairs is largely explained by language‑specific competences without pair‑specific interactions; (2) many model components influence both monolingual and translation tasks; and (3) fine‑tuning on monolingual data recovers most translation gains seen with aligned documents. These findings converge to support the hypothesis and point toward new ways to understand and improve LLM translation.

By Jacob Brinton, Jannik Brinkmann, Mark Crovella, Aaron Mueller