Machine Translation Digest for Oct 15 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring advancements in machine translation and related fields. A prominent theme is the evaluation and optimization of models, focusing on long-context understanding and preference optimization. These studies highlight the ongoing efforts to improve fidelity and effectiveness in language models and translation systems.
Beyond Single-Reward: Multi-Pair, Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization for Machine Translation
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences in Machine Translation (MT), but current methods are hindered by two fundamental challenges: (1) flawed reward signals from Quality Estimation (QE) models that overlook critical errors like translation hallucination, and (2) inefficient data utilization that discards valuable learning signals by selecting only a single win-loss pair. To address these limitations, we introduce M^2PO: Multi-Pair, Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization. Our framework integrates a multi-perspective reward engine that creates a more robust signal by combining two key viewpoints: a new hallucination penalty for factuality, and an innovative dynamic quality score that adaptively fuses external evaluations with the model's own evolving judgment. This is synergistically paired with a multi-pair construction strategy that systematically creates a comprehensive set of preference pairs from the entire pool of translation candidates. This synergistic approach ensures the model learns from a richer spectrum of quality trade-offs, leading to more robust and faithful translations. On challenging WMT21-22 benchmarks, M^2PO substantially outperforms existing preference optimization methods and demonstrates highly competitive performance against leading proprietary LLMs.
MMLongCite: A Benchmark for Evaluating Fidelity of Long-Context Vision-Language Models
The rapid advancement of large vision language models (LVLMs) has led to a significant expansion of their context windows. However, an extended context window does not guarantee the effective utilization of the context, posing a critical challenge for real-world applications. Current evaluations of such long-context faithfulness are predominantly focused on the text-only domain, while multimodal assessments remain limited to short contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMLongCite, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the fidelity of LVLMs in long-context scenarios. MMLongCite comprises 8 distinct tasks spanning 6 context length intervals and incorporates diverse modalities, including text, images, and videos. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LVLMs reveals their limited faithfulness in handling long multimodal contexts. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis of how context length and the position of crucial content affect the faithfulness of these models.
LiteraryQA: Towards Effective Evaluation of Long-document Narrative QA
Question Answering (QA) on narrative text poses a unique challenge to current systems, requiring a deep understanding of long, complex documents. However, the reliability of NarrativeQA, the most widely used benchmark in this domain, is hindered by noisy documents and flawed QA pairs. In this work, we introduce LiteraryQA, a high-quality subset of NarrativeQA focused on literary works. Using a human- and LLM-validated pipeline, we identify and correct low-quality QA samples while removing extraneous text from source documents. We then carry out a meta-evaluation of automatic metrics to clarify how systems should be evaluated on LiteraryQA. This analysis reveals that all n-gram-based metrics have a low system-level correlation to human judgment, while LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations, even with small open-weight models, can strongly agree with the ranking identified by humans. Finally, we benchmark a set of long-context LLMs on LiteraryQA. We release our code and data at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/LiteraryQA.
Evaluating Arabic Large Language Models: A Survey of Benchmarks, Methods, and Gaps
This survey provides the first systematic review of Arabic LLM benchmarks, analyzing 40+ evaluation benchmarks across NLP tasks, knowledge domains, cultural understanding, and specialized capabilities. We propose a taxonomy organizing benchmarks into four categories: Knowledge, NLP Tasks, Culture and Dialects, and Target-Specific evaluations. Our analysis reveals significant progress in benchmark diversity while identifying critical gaps: limited temporal evaluation, insufficient multi-turn dialogue assessment, and cultural misalignment in translated datasets. We examine three primary approaches: native collection, translation, and synthetic generation discussing their trade-offs regarding authenticity, scale, and cost. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for Arabic NLP researchers, providing insights into benchmark methodologies, reproducibility standards, and evaluation metrics while offering recommendations for future development.
Document Intelligence in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey
Document AI (DAI) has emerged as a vital application area, and is significantly transformed by the advent of large language models (LLMs). While earlier approaches relied on encoder-decoder architectures, decoder-only LLMs have revolutionized DAI, bringing remarkable advancements in understanding and generation. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of DAI's evolution, highlighting current research attempts and future prospects of LLMs in this field. We explore key advancements and challenges in multimodal, multilingual, and retrieval-augmented DAI, while also suggesting future research directions, including agent-based approaches and document-specific foundation models. This paper aims to provide a structured analysis of the state-of-the-art in DAI and its implications for both academic and practical applications.
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