GRRM: Group Relative Reward Modeling for Machine Translation
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in machine translation for NLP researchers, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of accurate intra-group ranking for machine translation in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by introducing the Group Relative Reward Model (GRRM), which processes candidate groups jointly to improve ranking accuracy and translation quality, achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art reasoning models.
While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) offers a powerful framework for LLM post-training, its effectiveness in open-ended domains like Machine Translation hinges on accurate intra-group ranking. We identify that standard Scalar Quality Metrics (SQM) fall short in this context; by evaluating candidates in isolation, they lack the comparative context necessary to distinguish fine-grained linguistic nuances. To address this, we introduce the Group Quality Metric (GQM) paradigm and instantiate it via the Group Relative Reward Model (GRRM). Unlike traditional independent scorers, GRRM processes the entire candidate group jointly, leveraging comparative analysis to rigorously resolve relative quality and adaptive granularity. Empirical evaluations confirm that GRRM achieves competitive ranking accuracy among all baselines. Building on this foundation, we integrate GRRM into the GRPO training loop to optimize the translation policy. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework not only improves general translation quality but also unlocks reasoning capabilities comparable to state-of-the-art reasoning models. We release codes, datasets, and model checkpoints at https://github.com/NJUNLP/GRRM.