Zhanglin Wu

Daimeng Wei, Zhanglin Wu, Hengchao Shang et al.

Back Translation (BT) is widely used in the field of machine translation, as it has been proved effective for enhancing translation quality. However, BT mainly improves the translation of inputs that share a similar style (to be more specific, translation-like inputs), since the source side of BT data is machine-translated. For natural inputs, BT brings only slight improvements and sometimes even adverse effects. To address this issue, we propose Text Style Transfer Back Translation (TST BT), which uses a style transfer model to modify the source side of BT data. By making the style of source-side text more natural, we aim to improve the translation of natural inputs. Our experiments on various language pairs, including both high-resource and low-resource ones, demonstrate that TST BT significantly improves translation performance against popular BT benchmarks. In addition, TST BT is proved to be effective in domain adaptation so this strategy can be regarded as a general data augmentation method. Our training code and text style transfer model are open-sourced.

Bin Wei, Jiawei Zhen, Zongyao Li et al.

This paper introduces the submission by Huawei Translation Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 Indian Languages Machine Translation (MT) Shared Task. To develop a reliable machine translation system for low-resource Indian languages, we employed two distinct knowledge transfer strategies, taking into account the characteristics of the language scripts and the support available from existing open-source models for Indian languages. For Assamese(as) and Manipuri(mn), we fine-tuned the existing IndicTrans2 open-source model to enable bidirectional translation between English and these languages. For Khasi (kh) and Mizo (mz), We trained a multilingual model as a baseline using bilingual data from these four language pairs, along with an additional about 8kw English-Bengali bilingual data, all of which share certain linguistic features. This was followed by fine-tuning to achieve bidirectional translation between English and Khasi, as well as English and Mizo. Our transfer learning experiments produced impressive results: 23.5 BLEU for en-as, 31.8 BLEU for en-mn, 36.2 BLEU for as-en, and 47.9 BLEU for mn-en on their respective test sets. Similarly, the multilingual model transfer learning experiments yielded impressive outcomes, achieving 19.7 BLEU for en-kh, 32.8 BLEU for en-mz, 16.1 BLEU for kh-en, and 33.9 BLEU for mz-en on their respective test sets. These results not only highlight the effectiveness of transfer learning techniques for low-resource languages but also contribute to advancing machine translation capabilities for low-resource Indian languages.

Zhanglin Wu, Min Zhang, Ming Zhu et al.

BERTScore is an effective and robust automatic metric for referencebased machine translation evaluation. In this paper, we incorporate multilingual knowledge graph into BERTScore and propose a metric named KG-BERTScore, which linearly combines the results of BERTScore and bilingual named entity matching for reference-free machine translation evaluation. From the experimental results on WMT19 QE as a metric without references shared tasks, our metric KG-BERTScore gets higher overall correlation with human judgements than the current state-of-the-art metrics for reference-free machine translation evaluation.1 Moreover, the pre-trained multilingual model used by KG-BERTScore and the parameter for linear combination are also studied in this paper.

Zhanglin Wu, Daimeng Wei, Zongyao Li et al.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 general machine translation (MT) shared task, where we participate in the English to Chinese (en2zh) language pair. Similar to previous years' work, we use training strategies such as regularized dropout, bidirectional training, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, alternated training, curriculum learning, and transductive ensemble learning to train the neural machine translation (NMT) model based on the deep Transformer-big architecture. The difference is that we also use continue pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and contrastive preference optimization to train the large language model (LLM) based MT model. By using Minimum Bayesian risk (MBR) decoding to select the final translation from multiple hypotheses for NMT and LLM-based MT models, our submission receives competitive results in the final evaluation.

Yuanchang Luo, Jiaxin Guo, Daimeng Wei et al.

This report outlines our approach for the WMT24 Discourse-Level Literary Translation Task, focusing on the Chinese-English language pair in the Constrained Track. Translating literary texts poses significant challenges due to the nuanced meanings, idiomatic expressions, and intricate narrative structures inherent in such works. To address these challenges, we leveraged the Chinese-Llama2 model, specifically enhanced for this task through a combination of Continual Pre-training (CPT) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our methodology includes a novel Incremental Decoding framework, which ensures that each sentence is translated with consideration of its broader context, maintaining coherence and consistency throughout the text. This approach allows the model to capture long-range dependencies and stylistic elements, producing translations that faithfully preserve the original literary quality. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in both sentence-level and document-level BLEU scores, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed framework in addressing the complexities of document-level literary translation.

Zhanglin Wu, Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei et al.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to machine translation tasks of the 20th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2024). We participate in the bilingual machine translation task and multi-domain machine translation task. For these two translation tasks, we use training strategies such as regularized dropout, bidirectional training, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, alternated training, curriculum learning, and transductive ensemble learning to train neural machine translation (NMT) models based on the deep Transformer-big architecture. Furthermore, to explore whether large language model (LLM) can help improve the translation quality of NMT systems, we use supervised fine-tuning to train llama2-13b as an Automatic post-editing (APE) model to improve the translation results of the NMT model on the multi-domain machine translation task. By using these plyometric strategies, our submission achieves a competitive result in the final evaluation.

Yuanchang Luo, Zhanglin Wu, Daimeng Wei et al.

This article introduces the submission status of the Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain task at (WMT 2024) by Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC). We participated in three translation tasks: spanish to aragonese (es-arg), spanish to aranese (es-arn), and spanish to asturian (es-ast). For these three translation tasks, we use training strategies such as multilingual transfer, regularized dropout, forward translation and back translation, labse denoising, transduction ensemble learning and other strategies to neural machine translation (NMT) model based on training deep transformer-big architecture. By using these enhancement strategies, our submission achieved a competitive result in the final evaluation.

Junxin Lu, Tengfei Song, Zhanglin Wu et al.

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) aims to translate text embedded in images in the source-language into target-language, requiring synergistic integration of visual perception and linguistic understanding. Existing TIMT methods, whether cascaded pipelines or end-to-end multimodal large language models (MLLMs),struggle with high-resolution text-rich images due to cluttered layouts, diverse fonts, and non-textual distractions, resulting in text omission, semantic drift, and contextual inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose GLoTran, a global-local dual visual perception framework for MLLM-based TIMT. GLoTran integrates a low-resolution global image with multi-scale region-level text image slices under an instruction-guided alignment strategy, conditioning MLLMs to maintain scene-level contextual consistency while faithfully capturing fine-grained textual details. Moreover, to realize this dual-perception paradigm, we construct GLoD, a large-scale text-rich TIMT dataset comprising 510K high-resolution global-local image-text pairs covering diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLoTran substantially improves translation completeness and accuracy over state-of-the-art MLLMs, offering a new paradigm for fine-grained TIMT under high-resolution and text-rich conditions.

Jinlong Yang, Hengchao Shang, Daimeng Wei et al.

This paper describes the submissions of Huawei Translation Services Center(HW-TSC) to WMT24 chat translation shared task on English$\leftrightarrow$Germany (en-de) bidirection. The experiments involved fine-tuning models using chat data and exploring various strategies, including Minimum Bayesian Risk (MBR) decoding and self-training. The results show significant performance improvements in certain directions, with the MBR self-training method achieving the best results. The Large Language Model also discusses the challenges and potential avenues for further research in the field of chat translation.

Zhanglin Wu, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie et al.

The rapid advancement of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has significantly propelled applications in document understanding, particularly in optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual translation. However, current evaluations of LVLMs, like the widely used OCRBench, mainly focus on verifying the correctness of their short-text responses and long-text responses with simple layout, while the evaluation of their ability to understand long texts with complex layout design is highly significant but largely overlooked. In this paper, we propose Menu OCR and Translation Benchmark (MOTBench), a specialized evaluation framework emphasizing the pivotal role of menu translation in cross-cultural communication. MOTBench requires LVLMs to accurately recognize and translate each dish, along with its price and unit items on a menu, providing a comprehensive assessment of their visual understanding and language processing capabilities. Our benchmark is comprised of a collection of Chinese and English menus, characterized by intricate layouts, a variety of fonts, and culturally specific elements across different languages, along with precise human annotations. Experiments show that our automatic evaluation results are highly consistent with professional human evaluation. We evaluate a range of publicly available state-of-the-art LVLMs, and through analyzing their output to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their performance, offering valuable insights to guide future advancements in LVLM development. MOTBench is available at https://github.com/gitwzl/MOTBench.

Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei, Shaojun Li et al.

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems often fail to transcribe domain-specific named entities, causing catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. Numerous fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models have been proposed in recent years. These models, mainly leveraging phonetic-level edit distance algorithms, have shown impressive performances. However, when the forms of the wrongly-transcribed words(s) and the ground-truth entity are significantly different, these methods often fail to locate the wrongly transcribed words in hypothesis, thus limiting their usage. We propose a novel NEC method that utilizes speech sound features to retrieve candidate entities. With speech sound features and candidate entities, we inovatively design a generative method to annotate entity errors in ASR transcripts and replace the text with correct entities. This method is effective in scenarios of word form difference. We test our method using open-source and self-constructed test sets. The results demonstrate that our NEC method can bring significant improvement to entity accuracy. The self-constructed training data and test set is publicly available at github.com/L6-NLP/Generative-Annotation-NEC.

Zhanglin Wu, Tengfei Song, Ning Xie et al.

This paper presents the technical solution proposed by Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC) for the "End-to-End Document Image Machine Translation for Complex Layouts" competition at the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (DIMT25@ICDAR2025). Leveraging state-of-the-art open-source large vision-language model (LVLM), we introduce a training framework that combines multi-task learning with perceptual chain-of-thought to develop a comprehensive end-to-end document translation system. During the inference phase, we apply minimum Bayesian decoding and post-processing strategies to further enhance the system's translation capabilities. Our solution uniquely addresses both OCR-based and OCR-free document image translation tasks within a unified framework. This paper systematically details the training methods, inference strategies, LVLM base models, training data, experimental setups, and results, demonstrating an effective approach to document image machine translation.

Jiaxin Guo, Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei et al.

The field of artificial intelligence has witnessed significant advancements in natural language processing, largely attributed to the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models form the backbone of Agents designed to address long-context dependencies, particularly in Document-level Machine Translation (DocMT). DocMT presents unique challenges, with quality, consistency, and fluency being the key metrics for evaluation. Existing approaches, such as Doc2Doc and Doc2Sent, either omit sentences or compromise fluency. This paper introduces Doc-Guided Sent2Sent++, an Agent that employs an incremental sentence-level forced decoding strategy \textbf{to ensure every sentence is translated while enhancing the fluency of adjacent sentences.} Our Agent leverages a Doc-Guided Memory, focusing solely on the summary and its translation, which we find to be an efficient approach to maintaining consistency. Through extensive testing across multiple languages and domains, we demonstrate that Sent2Sent++ outperforms other methods in terms of quality, consistency, and fluency. The results indicate that, our approach has achieved significant improvements in metrics such as s-COMET, d-COMET, LTCR-$1_f$, and document-level perplexity (d-ppl). The contributions of this paper include a detailed analysis of current DocMT research, the introduction of the Sent2Sent++ decoding method, the Doc-Guided Memory mechanism, and validation of its effectiveness across languages and domains.

Jiaxin Guo, Daimeng Wei, Yuanchang Luo et al.

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), enhancing their performance has become a research hotspot. This paper presents a novel multi-prompt ensemble decoding approach designed to bolster the generation quality of LLMs by leveraging the aggregation of outcomes from multiple prompts. Given a unique input $X$, we submit $n$ variations of prompts with $X$ to LLMs in batch mode to decode and derive probability distributions. For each token prediction, we calculate the ensemble probability by averaging the $n$ probability distributions within the batch, utilizing this aggregated probability to generate the token. This technique is dubbed Inner-Batch Ensemble. To facilitate efficient batch inference, we implement a Left-Padding strategy to maintain uniform input lengths across the n prompts. Through extensive experimentation on diverse NLP tasks, including machine translation, code generation, and text simplification, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method in enhancing LLM performance. The results show substantial improvements in BLEU scores, pass@$k$ rates, and LENS metrics over conventional methods.

Zhanglin Wu, Daimeng Wei, Xiaoyu Chen et al.

Large language model (LLM) shows promising performances in a variety of downstream tasks, such as machine translation (MT). However, using LLMs for translation suffers from high computational costs and significant latency. Based on our evaluation, in most cases, translations using LLMs are comparable to that generated by neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Only in particular scenarios, LLM and NMT models show respective advantages. As a result, integrating NMT and LLM for translation and using LLM only when necessary seems to be a sound solution. A scheduling policy that optimizes translation result while ensuring fast speed and as little LLM usage as possible is thereby required. We compare several scheduling policies and propose a novel and straightforward decider that leverages source sentence features. We conduct extensive experiments on multilingual test sets and the result shows that we can achieve optimal translation performance with minimal LLM usage, demonstrating effectiveness of our decider.

Jiaxin Guo, Zhanglin Wu, Zongyao Li et al.

Incremental Decoding is an effective framework that enables the use of an offline model in a simultaneous setting without modifying the original model, making it suitable for Low-Latency Simultaneous Speech Translation. However, this framework may introduce errors when the system outputs from incomplete input. To reduce these output errors, several strategies such as Hold-$n$, LA-$n$, and SP-$n$ can be employed, but the hyper-parameter $n$ needs to be carefully selected for optimal performance. Moreover, these strategies are more suitable for end-to-end systems than cascade systems. In our paper, we propose a new adaptable and efficient policy named "Regularized Batched Inputs". Our method stands out by enhancing input diversity to mitigate output errors. We suggest particular regularization techniques for both end-to-end and cascade systems. We conducted experiments on IWSLT Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) tasks, which demonstrate that our approach achieves low latency while maintaining no more than 2 BLEU points loss compared to offline systems. Furthermore, our SimulST systems attained several new state-of-the-art results in various language directions.

Jiaxin Guo, Daimeng Wei, Yuanchang Luo et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have ushered in a new era for document-level machine translation (\textit{doc}-mt), yet their whole-document outputs challenge existing evaluation methods that assume sentence-by-sentence alignment. We introduce \textit{\textbf{Align-then-Slide}}, a complete evaluation framework for ultra-long doc-mt. In the Align stage, we automatically infer sentence-level source-target correspondences and rebuild the target to match the source sentence number, resolving omissions and many-to-one/one-to-many mappings. In the n-Chunk Sliding Evaluate stage, we calculate averaged metric scores under 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-chunk for multi-granularity assessment. Experiments on the WMT benchmark show a Pearson correlation of 0.929 between our method with expert MQM rankings. On a newly curated real-world test set, our method again aligns closely with human judgments. Furthermore, preference data produced by Align-then-Slide enables effective CPO training and its direct use as a reward model for GRPO, both yielding translations preferred over a vanilla SFT baseline. The results validate our framework as an accurate, robust, and actionable evaluation tool for doc-mt systems.

Feifan Wang, Tengfei Song, Minggui He et al.

Facial emotion perception in the vision large language model (VLLM) is crucial for achieving natural human-machine interaction. However, creating high-quality annotations for both coarse- and fine-grained facial emotion analysis demands costly expertise. The lack of such high-quality instruction data limits the performance of VLLMs in facial emotion perception. To address this, we propose a self-verification approach with emotion knowledge enhancement (SEKE), which generates high-quality instruction data for multi-grained emotion analysis cost-effectively using closed-source VLLM. This approach integrates prior human knowledge to VLLM inference, guided by the inherent correlations between three grained levels of emotion descriptions, i.e., discrete expression, valence-arousal, and action unit, to reliably generate comprehensive annotations. A self-verification strategy with Uncertainty-Aware Monte Carlo sampling (SV-UAMC) is further embedded to efficiently extract more accurate VLLM predictions, further improving annotation reliability. Consequently, we construct a facial emotion instruction dataset (FEID) containing three comprehensive descriptions, which provides coarse- and fine-grained emotional information for effective model training. Additionally, we introduce a facial emotion analysis benchmark (FEAB) to measure the VLLM's corresponding ability. Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three downstream facial emotion analysis tasks.

Zhengzhe Yu, Jiaxin Guo, Minghan Wang et al.

Deep encoders have been proven to be effective in improving neural machine translation (NMT) systems, but it reaches the upper bound of translation quality when the number of encoder layers exceeds 18. Worse still, deeper networks consume a lot of memory, making it impossible to train efficiently. In this paper, we present Symbiosis Networks, which include a full network as the Symbiosis Main Network (M-Net) and another shared sub-network with the same structure but less layers as the Symbiotic Sub Network (S-Net). We adopt Symbiosis Networks on Transformer-deep (m-n) architecture and define a particular regularization loss $\mathcal{L}_τ$ between the M-Net and S-Net in NMT. We apply joint-training on the Symbiosis Networks and aim to improve the M-Net performance. Our proposed training strategy improves Transformer-deep (12-6) by 0.61, 0.49 and 0.69 BLEU over the baselines under classic training on WMT'14 EN->DE, DE->EN and EN->FR tasks. Furthermore, our Transformer-deep (12-6) even outperforms classic Transformer-deep (18-6).

Jiaxin Guo, Minghan Wang, Daimeng Wei et al.

Recently, non-autoregressive (NAT) models predict outputs in parallel, achieving substantial improvements in generation speed compared to autoregressive (AT) models. While performing worse on raw data, most NAT models are trained as student models on distilled data generated by AT teacher models, which is known as sequence-level Knowledge Distillation. An effective training strategy to improve the performance of AT models is Self-Distillation Mixup (SDM) Training, which pre-trains a model on raw data, generates distilled data by the pre-trained model itself and finally re-trains a model on the combination of raw data and distilled data. In this work, we aim to view SDM for NAT models, but find directly adopting SDM to NAT models gains no improvements in terms of translation quality. Through careful analysis, we observe the invalidation is correlated to Modeling Diversity and Confirmation Bias between the AT teacher model and the NAT student models. Based on these findings, we propose an enhanced strategy named SDMRT by adding two stages to classic SDM: one is Pre-Rerank on self-distilled data, the other is Fine-Tune on Filtered teacher-distilled data. Our results outperform baselines by 0.6 to 1.2 BLEU on multiple NAT models. As another bonus, for Iterative Refinement NAT models, our methods can outperform baselines within half iteration number, which means 2X acceleration.