针对大模型多语言翻译中的不对称冲突,提出定向训练策略提升效率。
Asymmetric Conflict and Synergy in Post-training for LLM-based Multilingual Machine Translation
- 发现翻译方向间语言冲突与协同存在不对称性,影响微调效果。
- 仅用200亿预训练词、170亿参数实现接近全量模型性能。
- 适合追求低资源高效率多语言翻译的开发者使用。
大型语言模型(LLM)推动了多语言机器翻译(MMT)的发展,但多语言诅咒(CoM)仍是主要挑战。现有方法通常通过扩大训练和计算开销缓解此问题,这引发关键疑问:高质多语言翻译是否真需大规模投入?抑或深入理解CoM能提供更高效方案?本文分析后训练阶段的语言冲突与协同机制,揭示其存在方向性不对称现象——不同翻译方向中冲突与协同主导程度不一,导致现有微调方法表现不佳。研究进一步发现,瓶颈在于后训练而非多语言预训练,亟需更有效的适配策略。基于此,提出方向感知训练与分组模型融合方法,显式应对不对称性。该方法仅使用X-ALMA-13B预训练数据(200亿词),参数量170亿,性能媲美仅经监督微调的XALMA-13B模型,在50种语言的Flores-200测试集上仅损失0.85点COMET得分,预训练词数减少5.5倍,模型规模缩小1.7倍。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has advanced the multilingual machine translation (MMT), yet the Curse of Multilinguality (CoM) remains a major challenge. Existing work in LLM-based MMT typically mitigates this issue via scaling up training and computation budget, which raises a critical question: Is scaling up the training and computation budget truly necessary for high-quality MMT, or can a deeper understanding of CoM provide a more efficient solution? To explore this problem, we analyze the linguistic conflicts and synergy, the underlying mechanism of CoM during post-training phase. We identify an asymmetric phenomenon in linguistic conflicts and synergy: the dominance of conflicts and synergy varies in different translation directions, leading to sub-optimal adaptation in existing post-training methods. We further find that a significant bottleneck in MMT appears to lie in post-training rather than multilingual pre-training, suggesting the need for more effective adaptation strategies. Building on these new insights, we propose a direction-aware training approach, combined with group-wise model merging, to address asymmetry in linguistic conflicts and synergy explicitly. Leveraging this strategy, our method fine-tunes X-ALMA-13B-Pretrain-trained only with multilingual pre-training-achieving comparable performance to XALMA-13B (only SFT) while using only 20B pretraining tokens and 17B parameters-5.5x fewer pretraining-tokens and 1.7x fewer model size-with just 0.85 COMET drop on Flores-200 testsets of 50 languages.
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