Machine Translation Digest for Nov 08 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers in the field of machine translation. The common themes include fine-tuning and improving large language models, with a focus on reducing biases and enhancing interpretability. Additionally, there is a significant interest in the application of these models in specific domains, such as medicine, highlighting technical, clinical, and ethical dimensions.
Interpretable Recognition of Cognitive Distortions in Natural Language Texts
We propose a new approach to multi-factor classification of natural language texts based on weighted structured patterns such as N-grams, taking into account the heterarchical relationships between them, applied to solve such a socially impactful problem as the automation of detection of specific cognitive distortions in psychological care, relying on an interpretable, robust and transparent artificial intelligence model. The proposed recognition and learning algorithms improve the current state of the art in this field. The improvement is tested on two publicly available datasets, with significant improvements over literature-known F1 scores for the task, with optimal hyper-parameters determined, having code and models available for future use by the community.
Multi-Reward GRPO Fine-Tuning for De-biasing Large Language Models: A Study Based on Chinese-Context Discrimination Data
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit implicit biases and discriminatory tendencies that reflect underlying social stereotypes. While recent alignment techniques such as RLHF and DPO have mitigated some of these issues, they remain limited in addressing culturally specific and multi-dimensional forms of discrimination. This paper proposes a Multi-Reward Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework to fine-tune LLMs toward ethical and bias-free behavior. Our approach constructs a synthetic English-language dataset derived from Chinese-context discrimination categories, including regional, ethnic, and occupational biases. Each instance is paired with both neutral and biased responses to train a reward model based on DeBERTa-v3, which provides multi-dimensional reward signals capturing fairness, neutrality, and linguistic quality. The trained reward model then guides GRPO fine-tuning to optimize model outputs along these ethical dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate significant reductions in bias intensity and improved alignment with non-discriminatory standards without compromising fluency or informativeness. This study highlights the effectiveness of GRPO-based multi-reward optimization for de-biasing LLMs and offers a replicable framework for cultural-contextual ethical alignment.
MuonAll: Muon Variant for Efficient Finetuning of Large Language Models
Muon optimizer has demonstrated robust results in pretraining of language models but its performance in finetuning of existing public pretrained models is not yet explored. Currently, Muon is used along with AdamW introducing a scope of improvement for adopting all parameters inside Muon. We introduce MuonAll, which incorporates all the parameters inside Muon by transforming into 2D matrices. We conduct extensive finetuning experiments across publicly available language models with model sizes upto half billion parameters. Muon and MuonAll perform at par with AdamW across major benchmarks, highlighting their effectiveness as alternative optimizers. We open-source the distributed implementations of Muon and MuonAll, available at https://github.com/Saurabh750/optimizer
Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine: A Scoping Review of Technical Implementations, Clinical Applications, and Ethical Considerations
The rapid growth of medical knowledge and increasing complexity of clinical practice pose challenges. In this context, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated value; however, inherent limitations remain. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technologies show potential to enhance their clinical applicability. This study reviewed RAG applications in medicine. We found that research primarily relied on publicly available data, with limited application in private data. For retrieval, approaches commonly relied on English-centric embedding models, while LLMs were mostly generic, with limited use of medical-specific LLMs. For evaluation, automated metrics evaluated generation quality and task performance, whereas human evaluation focused on accuracy, completeness, relevance, and fluency, with insufficient attention to bias and safety. RAG applications were concentrated on question answering, report generation, text summarization, and information extraction. Overall, medical RAG remains at an early stage, requiring advances in clinical validation, cross-linguistic adaptation, and support for low-resource settings to enable trustworthy and responsible global use.
Quantifying Edits Decay in Fine-tuned LLMs
Knowledge editing has emerged as a lightweight alternative to retraining for correcting or injecting specific facts in large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile, fine-tuning remains the default operation for adapting LLMs to new domains and tasks. Despite their widespread adoption, these two post-training interventions have been studied in isolation, leaving open a crucial question: if we fine-tune an edited model, do the edits survive? This question is motivated by two practical scenarios: removing covert or malicious edits, and preserving beneficial edits. If fine-tuning impairs edits as shown in Figure 1, current KE methods become less useful, as every fine-tuned model would require re-editing, which significantly increases the cost; if edits persist, fine-tuned models risk propagating hidden malicious edits, raising serious safety concerns. To this end, we systematically quantify edits decay after fine-tuning, investigating how fine-tuning affects knowledge editing. We evaluate two state-of-the-art editing methods (MEMIT, AlphaEdit) and three fine-tuning approaches (full-parameter, LoRA, DoRA) across five LLMs and three datasets, yielding 232 experimental configurations. Our results show that edits decay after fine-tuning, with survival varying across configurations, e.g., AlphaEdit edits decay more than MEMIT edits. Further, we propose selective-layer fine-tuning and find that fine-tuning edited layers only can effectively remove edits, though at a slight cost to downstream performance. Surprisingly, fine-tuning non-edited layers impairs more edits than full fine-tuning. Overall, our study establishes empirical baselines and actionable strategies for integrating knowledge editing with fine-tuning, and underscores that evaluating model editing requires considering the full LLM application pipeline.