arXiv AI
Aug 25

Length-Adaptive Decoding for Masked Diffusion Machine Translation

The paper introduces Entropy-Valley (EV), a training‑free method for selecting target length in masked diffusion machine translation. EV evaluates candidate canvases by mean predictive entropy from all‑mask forward passes, choosing the length the model is best prepared to fill. Compared to a baseline that uses training‑corpus length statistics, EV recovers a substantial portion of the COMET‑22 gain across En→Zh, Zh→En, and En→De, and expert evaluation confirms adequacy improvements, especially for Zh→En.

By Yan Zhan, Mengkai Hou, Wanting Zhang, Zhijun Gao