Zhihong Huang

Runzhe Zhan, Zhihong Huang, Xinyi Yang et al.

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have introduced an intermediate "thinking" process prior to generating final answers, improving their reasoning capabilities on complex downstream tasks. However, the potential of LRMs as evaluators for machine translation (MT) quality remains underexplored. We provides the first systematic analysis of LRM-as-a-judge in MT evaluation. We identify key challenges, revealing LRMs require tailored evaluation materials, tend to "overthink" simpler instances and have issues with scoring mechanisms leading to overestimation. To address these, we propose to calibrate LRM thinking by training them on synthetic, human-like thinking trajectories. Our experiments on WMT24 Metrics benchmarks demonstrate that this approach largely reduces thinking budgets by ~35x while concurrently improving evaluation performance across different LRM scales from 7B to 32B (e.g., R1-Distill-Qwen-7B achieves a +8.7 correlation point improvement). These findings highlight the potential of efficiently calibrated LRMs to advance fine-grained automatic MT evaluation.

Zhihong Huang, Longyue Wang, Siyou Liu et al.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have produced substantial improvements in discourse-aware neural machine translation (NMT), for example, improved coherence in spoken language translation. However, the underlying reasons for their strong performance have not been well explained. To bridge this gap, we introduce a probing task to interpret the ability of PLMs to capture discourse relation knowledge. We validate three state-of-the-art PLMs across encoder-, decoder-, and encoder-decoder-based models. The analysis shows that (1) the ability of PLMs on discourse modelling varies from architecture and layer; (2) discourse elements in a text lead to different learning difficulties for PLMs. Besides, we investigate the effects of different PLMs on spoken language translation. Through experiments on IWSLT2017 Chinese-English dataset, we empirically reveal that NMT models initialized from different layers of PLMs exhibit the same trends with the probing task. Our findings are instructive to understand how and when discourse knowledge in PLMs should work for downstream tasks.