MT-RewardTree: A Comprehensive Framework for Advancing LLM-Based Machine Translation via Reward Modeling

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feng, Zhaopeng, Ren, Jiahan, Su, Jiayuan, Zheng, Jiamei, Wang, Hongwei, Liu, Zuozhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911162797391872
author Feng, Zhaopeng
Ren, Jiahan
Su, Jiayuan
Zheng, Jiamei
Wang, Hongwei
Liu, Zuozhu
author_facet Feng, Zhaopeng
Ren, Jiahan
Su, Jiayuan
Zheng, Jiamei
Wang, Hongwei
Liu, Zuozhu
contents Process reward models (PRMs) have shown success in complex reasoning tasks for large language models (LLMs). However, their application to machine translation (MT) remains underexplored due to the lack of systematic methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{MT-RewardTree}, a comprehensive framework for constructing, evaluating, and deploying process reward models in MT. Unlike traditional vanilla preference pair construction, we propose a novel method for automatically generating token-level preference pairs using approximate Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which mitigates the prohibitive cost of human annotation for fine-grained steps. Then, we establish the first MT-specific reward model benchmark and provide a systematic comparison of different reward modeling architectures, revealing that token-level supervision effectively captures fine-grained preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our MT-PRM-Qwen-2.5-3B achieves state-of-the-art performance in both token-level and sequence-level evaluation given the same input prefix. Furthermore, we showcase practical applications where PRMs enable test-time alignment for LLMs without additional alignment training and significantly improve performance in hypothesis ensembling. Our work provides valuable insights into the role of reward models in MT research. Our code and data are released in \href{https://sabijun.github.io/MT_RewardTreePage/}{https://sabijun.github.io/MT\_RewardTreePage}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_12123
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MT-RewardTree: A Comprehensive Framework for Advancing LLM-Based Machine Translation via Reward Modeling
Feng, Zhaopeng
Ren, Jiahan
Su, Jiayuan
Zheng, Jiamei
Wang, Hongwei
Liu, Zuozhu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Process reward models (PRMs) have shown success in complex reasoning tasks for large language models (LLMs). However, their application to machine translation (MT) remains underexplored due to the lack of systematic methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{MT-RewardTree}, a comprehensive framework for constructing, evaluating, and deploying process reward models in MT. Unlike traditional vanilla preference pair construction, we propose a novel method for automatically generating token-level preference pairs using approximate Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which mitigates the prohibitive cost of human annotation for fine-grained steps. Then, we establish the first MT-specific reward model benchmark and provide a systematic comparison of different reward modeling architectures, revealing that token-level supervision effectively captures fine-grained preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our MT-PRM-Qwen-2.5-3B achieves state-of-the-art performance in both token-level and sequence-level evaluation given the same input prefix. Furthermore, we showcase practical applications where PRMs enable test-time alignment for LLMs without additional alignment training and significantly improve performance in hypothesis ensembling. Our work provides valuable insights into the role of reward models in MT research. Our code and data are released in \href{https://sabijun.github.io/MT_RewardTreePage/}{https://sabijun.github.io/MT\_RewardTreePage}.
title MT-RewardTree: A Comprehensive Framework for Advancing LLM-Based Machine Translation via Reward Modeling
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12123