FeedTrans: Enhance Machine Translation via Feedback

Abstract

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown exceptional performance in complex tasks such as mathematics and coding. In the field of machine translation (MT), reinforcement learning (RL) has been utilized to enhance the quality of translations. However, traditional RL approaches rely heavily on the base model’s inherent translation capabilities, which may falter when dealing with terminology translations and domain-specific expressions without sufficient guidance. In this paper, we introduce FeedTrans (Feedback-driven Translation), which employs a FeedRollout mechanism to incorporate feedback as guidance, enabling the production of high-quality translations and expanding the search space for improved translation outcomes. Extensive experiments across six translation tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at utilizing feedback in MT-oriented RL. https://github.com/Acerkoo/FeedTrans