Mitigating the Language Mismatch and Repetition Issues in LLM-based Machine Translation via Model Editing

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Main Authors: Wang, Weichuan, Li, Zhaoyi, Lian, Defu, Ma, Chen, Song, Linqi, Wei, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Weichuan
Li, Zhaoyi
Lian, Defu
Ma, Chen
Song, Linqi
Wei, Ying
author_facet Wang, Weichuan
Li, Zhaoyi
Lian, Defu
Ma, Chen
Song, Linqi
Wei, Ying
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently revolutionized the NLP field, while they still fall short in some specific down-stream tasks. In the work, we focus on utilizing LLMs to perform machine translation, where we observe that two patterns of errors frequently occur and drastically affect the translation quality: language mismatch and repetition. The work sets out to explore the potential for mitigating these two issues by leveraging model editing methods, e.g., by locating Feed-Forward Network (FFN) neurons or something that are responsible for the errors and deactivating them in the inference time. We find that directly applying such methods either limited effect on the targeted errors or has significant negative side-effect on the general translation quality, indicating that the located components may also be crucial for ensuring machine translation with LLMs on the rails. To this end, we propose to refine the located components by fetching the intersection of the locating results under different language settings, filtering out the aforementioned information that is irrelevant to targeted errors. The experiment results empirically demonstrate that our methods can effectively reduce the language mismatch and repetition ratios and meanwhile enhance or keep the general translation quality in most cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07054
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating the Language Mismatch and Repetition Issues in LLM-based Machine Translation via Model Editing
Wang, Weichuan
Li, Zhaoyi
Lian, Defu
Ma, Chen
Song, Linqi
Wei, Ying
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently revolutionized the NLP field, while they still fall short in some specific down-stream tasks. In the work, we focus on utilizing LLMs to perform machine translation, where we observe that two patterns of errors frequently occur and drastically affect the translation quality: language mismatch and repetition. The work sets out to explore the potential for mitigating these two issues by leveraging model editing methods, e.g., by locating Feed-Forward Network (FFN) neurons or something that are responsible for the errors and deactivating them in the inference time. We find that directly applying such methods either limited effect on the targeted errors or has significant negative side-effect on the general translation quality, indicating that the located components may also be crucial for ensuring machine translation with LLMs on the rails. To this end, we propose to refine the located components by fetching the intersection of the locating results under different language settings, filtering out the aforementioned information that is irrelevant to targeted errors. The experiment results empirically demonstrate that our methods can effectively reduce the language mismatch and repetition ratios and meanwhile enhance or keep the general translation quality in most cases.
title Mitigating the Language Mismatch and Repetition Issues in LLM-based Machine Translation via Model Editing
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07054