Today’s MT digest highlights a field pushing on both better generation quality and leaner, more practical systems. A strong common thread is efficiency: from compact translation setups and parameter-efficient search to faster diffusion-style language modeling, the focus is on getting more performance from less compute or smaller models. Another theme is quality through structure, with work on cleaner aligned data, edit-based refinement, and trajectory-aware distillation showing how better supervision and iterative correction can improve multilingual and multimodal translation outputs.

Align and Shine: Building High-Quality Sentence-Aligned Corpora for Multilingual Text Simplification

Text simplification plays a crucial role in improving the accessibility and comprehensibility of written information for diverse audiences, including language learners and readers with limited literacy. Despite its importance, large-scale, high-quality datasets for training and evaluating text simplification models remain scarce for languages other than English. This paper reports an experimental study on the collection and processing of crowd-sourced simplification data from comparable corpora to construct a corpus suitable for both training and testing text simplification systems across multiple languages (Catalan, English, French, Italian and Spanish). We report mechanisms for sentence-level alignment from document-level data. The resulting dataset of the aligned sentence pairs is publicly available.

Parameter-Efficient Neuroevolution for Diverse LLM Generation: Quality-Diversity Optimization via Prompt Embedding Evolution

Large Language Models exhibit mode collapse, producing homogeneous outputs that fail to explore valid solution spaces. We present QD-LLM, a framework for parameter-efficient neuroevolution that evolves prompt embeddings, compact neural interfaces (~32K parameters) that steer generation in frozen LLMs (70B+ parameters), within a Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization framework. Our contributions: (1) evolved prompt embeddings via gradient-free optimization enabling behavioral steering without model fine-tuning; (2) hybrid behavior characterization combining semantic and explicit features with formal coverage bounds (Theorem 1) under validated near-independence (NMI $= 0.08 \pm 0.02$); (3) co-evolutionary variation operators including targeted behavioral mutation via finite-difference gradient estimation. On HumanEval (164 problems), MBPP, and creative writing benchmarks, QD-LLM achieves 46.4% higher coverage and 41.4% higher QD-Score than QDAIF ($p<0.001$, 30 runs, Vargha-Delaney $A=0.94$). We demonstrate downstream utility: diverse archives improve test generation (34% more edge cases) and fine-tuning data quality (8.3% accuracy gain). We validate across open-source LLMs (Llama-3-70B, Mistral-Large) with full embedding access, establishing prompt embedding evolution as an effective paradigm bridging neuroevolution and modern LLMs.

Towards Compact Sign Language Translation: Frame Rate and Model Size Trade-offs

Sign Language Translation (SLT) converts sign language videos into spoken-language text, bridging communication between Deaf and hearing communities. Current gloss-free approaches rely on large encoder-decoder models, limiting deployment. We propose a compact 77M-parameter pipeline that couples MMPose skeletal pose extraction with a single linear projection into T5-small. By varying the input frame rate, we expose a practical efficiency trade-off: at 12 fps the model halves its sequence length, achieving a 75% reduction in encoder quadratic self-attention computational complexity while incurring only a modest BLEU-4 drop (9.53 vs. 10.06 at 24 fps on How2Sign). Our system is roughly 3x smaller than prior T5-base systems, demonstrating that a lightweight architecture can remain competitive without hierarchical encoders or large-scale models.

Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a mismatch between token-level training objectives and joint sequence consistency. In this paper, we propose ME-DLM, an edit-based refinement framework that augments diffusion generation with lightweight post-editing steps. After producing an initial complete response, the model refines it through minimal edit operations, including replacement, deletion, and insertion, conditioned on the full sequence. Training supervision is derived from edit distance, providing a deterministic signal under a fixed canonicalization scheme for learning minimal corrections. This approach encourages sequence-level consistency through globally conditioned edits while preserving the efficiency benefits of parallel diffusion decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ME-DLM improves the quality and robustness of multi-token parallel generation. In particular, when built upon LLaDA, our method achieves consistent gains of 11.6 points on HumanEval and 33.6 points on GSM8K while using one-eighth of the total diffusion steps. Code is available at https://github.com/renhouxing/ME-DLM.

TAD: Temporal-Aware Trajectory Self-Distillation for Fast and Accurate Diffusion LLM

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising paradigm for parallel text generation, but in practice they face an accuracy-parallelism trade-off, where increasing tokens per forward (TPF) often degrades generation quality. Existing acceleration methods often gain speed at the cost of accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose TAD, a Temporal-Aware trajectory self-Distillation framework. During data construction, we condition a teacher model on both the prompt and the ground-truth response to generate decoding trajectories, recording the intermediate masked states throughout the process. Based on how many decoding steps remain before each masked token is revealed, we partition masked positions into near and distant subsets. For near tokens, we train the student with a hard cross-entropy loss using the teacher trajectory tokens as labels, encouraging confident predictions for tokens that are about to be decoded. For distant tokens, we apply a soft KL divergence loss between the teacher and student token distributions, providing softer supervision and preserving future planning knowledge. This temporal-aware partition naturally gives rise to two deployment configurations: a Quality model that prioritizes accuracy and a Speed model that favors more aggressive acceleration. Experiments show that TAD consistently improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off. On LLaDA, it raises average accuracy from 46.2\% to 51.6\% with the Quality model and average AUP from 46.2 to 257.1 with the Speed model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BHmingyang/TAD