Evolutionary Optimization of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model Inference Parameters for Spanish Text Simplification

Optimizing Large Language Models for Robust Domain-Specific Text-to-SQL: From Prompting to Preference Alignment

A Factorial Study of Synthetic Data Generation for Low-Resource Machine Translation using Grammar Books

Most endangered languages lack the parallel data required for machine translation, despite the existence of descriptive grammar books. We introduce a pipeline that uses large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from grammar books and generate synthetic parallel corpora for fine-tuning-rather than feeding grammar content into prompts at inference time, as in prior work. Validated on three typologically diverse low-resource languages-Kalamang (Papuan), Tuatschin (Romance), and Mandan (Siouan)-we show that fine-tuning on synthetic data improves over seed-data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, with best-case ChrF++ gains of +8.8, +5.3, and +3.3 respectively. Through a systematic factorial study across 96 configurations varying target part-of-speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume, we identify which factor combinations drive gains and where they break down. Our results demonstrate that static linguistic documentation can be repurposed for machine translation fine-tuning, offering a practical path towards translation tools for severely under-resourced languages.

The Pitfalls of Maximum Likelihood Training of TPMs for Controllable Language Generation

This work finds that likelihood-trained TPMs can result in failed generations due to overly large corrections to the LM’s logits, and trains TPMs with LM-aligned objectives that better align with the LM token-probability space.

Instruction-Tuned Translation Language Model Focused On Turkish

Large language models have high computation and inference costs. Recently, Small Language Models (SLMs) have become more important because they require fewer resources and offer high efficiency. Different training approaches can be used for SLMs to achieve high performance, even on resource-constrained hardware.In this study, we present our MT-270M translation model. It was trained using instruction fine-tuning to provide high efficiency and success for bidirectional translation between Turkish and English. We observe how we selected the datasets for the training phase and how data selection affects translation quality. Then, we explain how we prepared our high-quality training data. Finally, we examine the effects of data quality changes and including different tasks in the training process on the success of the small language model.

Audience-Customized Translation of Rule-Based Evidence with Large Language Models Across Multiplexer Benchmarks

Evolutionary rule-based machine learning (ERBML) algorithms can capture complex relationships while still yielding highly interpretable models comprised of IF:THEN rules. During prediction, 'matching' rules contribute to, and form the explanation for, the model's prediction. However, rules and their associated parameters (in their raw form) are likely too technical for their intended users. This study examines the feasibility of using a large language model (LLM) to translate the prediction evidence from matching rules into natural language text for different audiences, e.g. layman, clinician, expert. Using models trained by the 'HEROS' ERBML on MUX benchmarks, we evaluate LLM text quality metrics under different scenarios (i.e. 1,800 prediction explanations). We observe that (1), intuitively, LLM quality performance improves on HEROS models that have been more ideally trained, (2) making a glossary available to the LLM to define feature names generally raises explanation audience-fit scores and sometimes lowers overstatement (beyond rule-evidence), but it also lengthens explanations and often increases hallucination rate, and (3) audience customization creates some LLM performance trade-offs. These results suggest that constrained LLM translation of rules for natural language prediction explanations is feasible, while highlighting the importance of carefully designing the LLM prompts and evidence input from the ERBML.

Efficient Multilingual Neural Machine Translation via Corpus-Driven Vocabulary Pruning: An English-Arabic Case Study

This paper proposes a general optimization framework that combines a vocabulary pruning method with a targeted fine-tuning protocol for MNMT models, and reduces the vocabulary size from over 128,000 to approximately 10,000 tokens, enabling a 60% memory saving without any loss in performance.