arXiv Machine Learning

Fine-Tuning LLMs for Translation: General Forgetting Mitigation Does Not Preserve MT-Specific Instruction Following

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EuroAlpaca: Task-Preserving Localisation of Instruction Data for European Languages

EuroAlpaca presents a task‑preserving localisation pipeline that translates English instruction‑tuning data into 50 European languages while maintaining task‑critical constraints. The method uses field‑wise machine translation or reconstructs task‑equivalent target‑language instances, followed by validation of coherence and consistency. Experiments show that EuroAlpaca improves instruction‑following accuracy by 12.9% over a baseline and outperforms direct translation on ROUGE‑L and F‑BERT metrics.

By Aleix Sant, Jordi Luque, Carlos Escolano
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

MultiSynt/MT: Trillion-Token Multi-Parallel Pre-Training Data Translated Across 36 Languages

arXiv:2607.00890v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open web-scale pre-training corpora remain concentrated in English, limiting multilingual LLM development. We introduce MultiSynt/MT, an open synth...

By Maximilian Idahl, J\"org Tiedemann, Sampo Pyysalo, David Salinas, Tomasz Galica, Shenbin Qian, Tudor Nicolae Mateiu, Zihao Li, Anna Lokrantz, Fedor Vitiugin, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Jenna Kanerva, Filip Ginter, Matthias Lindemann, Tim Isbister, Birger Moell, Jonas Lindh, Jan Haji\v{c}, Jenia Jitsev, Andrey Kutuzov, Stephan Oepen, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

LuxIT: A Luxembourgish Instruction Tuning Dataset from Monolingual Seed Data

LuxIT is a monolingual instruction‑tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, created by synthesizing instruction‑answer pairs from native texts using the DeepSeek‑R1‑0528 model and a quality‑assurance LLM‑as‑judge process. The resulting 227,507 high‑quality pairs were used to fine‑tune 14 LLMs (≤15 B parameters), yielding an average accuracy increase of +5.37 percentage points on standardized Luxembourgish proficiency exams and improvements in macro‑averaged F1 on nine of the fourteen downstream NLP tasks. These findings demonstrate that synthetic monolingual data can effectively enhance LLM performance in low‑resource languages and reveal the complex relationship between exam performance and practical NLP gains.

By Julian Valline, Cedric Lothritz, Siwen Guo, Jordi Cabot
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Choosing the Right Language Mode at Inference Time for Multilingual Reliability

The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can be guided to reason more reliably in low- to mid-resource languages by selecting appropriate language modes during inference. Experiments with LLaMA and Qwen models show that using English context can correct errors from non‑English comprehension, but adding redundant bilingual context can cause interference. To balance this trade‑off, the authors propose Reliability‑Aware Adaptive Inference (RAAI), a training‑free test‑time framework that routes prompts based on Expected Calibration Error and gates reasoning with a mid‑layer Risk Index, achieving up to 37.7% accuracy gains and reduced calibration error on low‑resource languages.

By Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Benchmarking Gender Bias in Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics across Occupations

The paper investigates gender bias in machine translation evaluation metrics using an occupation-balanced subset of GAMBIT+ across seven English‑source language pairs, including a new German extension. It finds that masculine translations tend to receive higher scores and that biases align with stereotypical gender representations, though the strength varies by evaluator and language. The study highlights that assessing bias requires multiple dimensions beyond a single aggregate measure.

By Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Giorgos Filandrianos, Wafaa Mohammed, Giuseppe Attanasio, Chrysoula Zerva
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Ladders in Chaos: When, How, (and Perhaps Why) Does Test-Time Scaling Improve LLM Machine Translation

The paper examines two test‑time scaling methods for large language models in machine translation: sequential sampling, where later attempts build on earlier ones, and parallel sampling, such as independent i.i.d. sampling with reranking. Sequential sampling shows a higher performance ceiling, offering a more diverse and effective set of translations, especially with limited sampling budgets. Human analysis reveals that while sequential sampling improves fluency and naturalness, it can reduce accuracy when the inference budget is large, and the authors attribute this effect to the model’s access to a larger target‑side context.

By Di Wu, Sergey Troshin, Christof Monz, Antske Fokkens, Vlad Niculae
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