Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866929728478248960 |
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| author | Cui, Menglong Gao, Pengzhi Liu, Wei Luan, Jian Wang, Bin |
| author_facet | Cui, Menglong Gao, Pengzhi Liu, Wei Luan, Jian Wang, Bin |
| contents | Large language models (LLMs) have shown continuously improving multilingual capabilities, and even small-scale open-source models have demonstrated rapid performance enhancement. In this paper, we systematically explore the abilities of open LLMs with less than ten billion parameters to handle multilingual machine translation (MT) tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on six popular LLMs and find that models like Gemma2-9B exhibit impressive multilingual translation capabilities. We then introduce the Parallel-First Monolingual-Second (PFMS) data mixing strategy in the continual pretraining stage to further enhance the MT performance and present GemmaX2-28, a 9B model achieving top-tier multilingual translation performance across 28 languages. Specifically, GemmaX2-28 consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as TowerInstruct and XALMA and achieves competitive performance with Google Translate and GPT-4-turbo. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02481 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study Cui, Menglong Gao, Pengzhi Liu, Wei Luan, Jian Wang, Bin Computation and Language Large language models (LLMs) have shown continuously improving multilingual capabilities, and even small-scale open-source models have demonstrated rapid performance enhancement. In this paper, we systematically explore the abilities of open LLMs with less than ten billion parameters to handle multilingual machine translation (MT) tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on six popular LLMs and find that models like Gemma2-9B exhibit impressive multilingual translation capabilities. We then introduce the Parallel-First Monolingual-Second (PFMS) data mixing strategy in the continual pretraining stage to further enhance the MT performance and present GemmaX2-28, a 9B model achieving top-tier multilingual translation performance across 28 languages. Specifically, GemmaX2-28 consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as TowerInstruct and XALMA and achieves competitive performance with Google Translate and GPT-4-turbo. |
| title | Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02481 |