Machine Translation Digest for Jun 11 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers, focusing on advancements in language model alignment, bias mitigation, and collaboration. The featured research explores improving model efficiency, addressing gender bias in translation, and enhancing cooperation and coordination in multi-agent systems.
Towards Efficient and Effective Alignment of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel methodologies in data collection, training, and evaluation. We first address alignment data collection. Existing approaches rely heavily on manually curated datasets or proprietary models. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lion, an adversarial distillation framework that iteratively refines training data by identifying and generating challenging instructions, enabling state-of-the-art zero-shot reasoning. Additionally, we introduce Web Reconstruction (WebR), a fully automated framework that synthesizes instruction-tuning data directly from raw web documents, significantly improving data diversity and scalability over existing synthetic data methods. Next, we enhance alignment training through novel optimization techniques. We develop Learning to Edit (LTE), a framework that enables LLMs to efficiently integrate new knowledge while preserving existing information. LTE leverages meta-learning to improve both real-time and batch knowledge updates. Furthermore, we introduce Bridging and Modeling Correlations (BMC), a refinement of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that explicitly captures token-level correlations in preference data, leading to superior alignment across QA and mathematical reasoning tasks. Finally, we tackle the challenge of evaluating alignment. Existing benchmarks emphasize response quality but overlook adherence to specific constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce FollowBench, a multi-level, fine-grained benchmark assessing LLMs' ability to follow complex constraints across diverse instruction types. Our results expose key weaknesses in current models' constraint adherence, offering insights for future improvements.
Gender Bias in English-to-Greek Machine Translation
As the demand for inclusive language increases, concern has grown over the susceptibility of machine translation (MT) systems to reinforce gender stereotypes. This study investigates gender bias in two commercial MT systems, Google Translate and DeepL, focusing on the understudied English-to-Greek language pair. We address three aspects of gender bias: i) male bias, ii) occupational stereotyping, and iii) errors in anti-stereotypical translations. Additionally, we explore the potential of prompted GPT-4o as a bias mitigation tool that provides both gender-explicit and gender-neutral alternatives when necessary. To achieve this, we introduce GendEL, a manually crafted bilingual dataset of 240 gender-ambiguous and unambiguous sentences that feature stereotypical occupational nouns and adjectives. We find persistent gender bias in translations by both MT systems; while they perform well in cases where gender is explicitly defined, with DeepL outperforming both Google Translate and GPT-4o in feminine gender-unambiguous sentences, they are far from producing gender-inclusive or neutral translations when the gender is unspecified. GPT-4o shows promise, generating appropriate gendered and neutral alternatives for most ambiguous cases, though residual biases remain evident.
Taming SQL Complexity: LLM-Based Equivalence Evaluation for Text-to-SQL
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced Text-to-SQL (NL2SQL) systems, yet evaluating the semantic equivalence of generated SQL remains a challenge, especially given ambiguous user queries and multiple valid SQL interpretations. This paper explores using LLMs to assess both semantic and a more practical "weak" semantic equivalence. We analyze common patterns of SQL equivalence and inequivalence, discuss challenges in LLM-based evaluation.
Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
To steer pretrained language models for downstream tasks, today's post-training paradigm relies on humans to specify desired behaviors. However, for models with superhuman capabilities, it is difficult or impossible to get high-quality human supervision. To address this challenge, we introduce a new unsupervised algorithm, Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM), to fine-tune pretrained language models on their own generated labels, \emph{without external supervision}. On GSM8k-verification, TruthfulQA, and Alpaca reward modeling tasks, our method matches the performance of training on golden supervision and outperforms training on crowdsourced human supervision. On tasks where LMs' capabilities are strongly superhuman, our method can elicit those capabilities significantly better than training on human labels. Finally, we show that our method can improve the training of frontier LMs: we use our method to train an unsupervised reward model and use reinforcement learning to train a Claude 3.5 Haiku-based assistant. Both the reward model and the assistant outperform their human-supervised counterparts.
Multi-Agent Language Models: Advancing Cooperation, Coordination, and Adaptation
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero-shot and few-shot generalization capabilities across complex natural language tasks, enabling their widespread use as virtual assistants for diverse applications such as translation and summarization. Despite being trained solely on large corpora of text without explicit supervision on author intent, LLMs appear to infer the underlying meaning of textual interactions. This raises a fundamental question: can LLMs model and reason about the intentions of others, i.e., do they possess a form of theory of mind? Understanding other's intentions is crucial for effective collaboration, which underpins human societal success and is essential for cooperative interactions among multiple agents, including humans and autonomous systems. In this work, we investigate the theory of mind in LLMs through the lens of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents learn to collaborate via repeated interactions, mirroring human social reasoning. Our approach aims to enhance artificial agent's ability to adapt and cooperate with both artificial and human partners. By leveraging LLM-based agents capable of natural language interaction, we move towards creating hybrid human-AI systems that can foster seamless collaboration, with broad implications for the future of human-artificial interaction.
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