How Small Can You Go? Compact Language Models for On-Device Critical Error Detection in Machine Translation
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866917076672708608 |
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| author | Chopra, Muskaan Sparrenberg, Lorenz Khanna, Sarthak Sifa, Rafet |
| author_facet | Chopra, Muskaan Sparrenberg, Lorenz Khanna, Sarthak Sifa, Rafet |
| contents | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at evaluating machine translation (MT), but their scale and cost hinder deployment on edge devices and in privacy-sensitive workflows. We ask: how small can you get while still detecting meaning-altering translation errors? Focusing on English->German Critical Error Detection (CED), we benchmark sub-2B models (LFM2-350M, Qwen-3-0.6B/1.7B, Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct, Gemma-3-1B) across WMT21, WMT22, and SynCED-EnDe-2025. Our framework standardizes prompts, applies lightweight logit-bias calibration and majority voting, and reports both semantic quality (MCC, F1-ERR/F1-NOT) and compute metrics (VRAM, latency, throughput). Results reveal a clear sweet spot around one billion parameters: Gemma-3-1B provides the best quality-efficiency trade-off, reaching MCC=0.77 with F1-ERR=0.98 on SynCED-EnDe-2025 after merged-weights fine-tuning, while maintaining 400 ms single-sample latency on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24 GB). At larger scale, Qwen-3-1.7B attains the highest absolute MCC (+0.11 over Gemma) but with higher compute cost. In contrast, ultra-small models (0.6B) remain usable with few-shot calibration yet under-detect entity and number errors. Overall, compact, instruction-tuned LLMs augmented with lightweight calibration and small-sample supervision can deliver trustworthy, on-device CED for MT, enabling private, low-cost error screening in real-world translation pipelines. All datasets, prompts, and scripts are publicly available at our GitHub repository. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09748 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | How Small Can You Go? Compact Language Models for On-Device Critical Error Detection in Machine Translation Chopra, Muskaan Sparrenberg, Lorenz Khanna, Sarthak Sifa, Rafet Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at evaluating machine translation (MT), but their scale and cost hinder deployment on edge devices and in privacy-sensitive workflows. We ask: how small can you get while still detecting meaning-altering translation errors? Focusing on English->German Critical Error Detection (CED), we benchmark sub-2B models (LFM2-350M, Qwen-3-0.6B/1.7B, Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct, Gemma-3-1B) across WMT21, WMT22, and SynCED-EnDe-2025. Our framework standardizes prompts, applies lightweight logit-bias calibration and majority voting, and reports both semantic quality (MCC, F1-ERR/F1-NOT) and compute metrics (VRAM, latency, throughput). Results reveal a clear sweet spot around one billion parameters: Gemma-3-1B provides the best quality-efficiency trade-off, reaching MCC=0.77 with F1-ERR=0.98 on SynCED-EnDe-2025 after merged-weights fine-tuning, while maintaining 400 ms single-sample latency on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24 GB). At larger scale, Qwen-3-1.7B attains the highest absolute MCC (+0.11 over Gemma) but with higher compute cost. In contrast, ultra-small models (0.6B) remain usable with few-shot calibration yet under-detect entity and number errors. Overall, compact, instruction-tuned LLMs augmented with lightweight calibration and small-sample supervision can deliver trustworthy, on-device CED for MT, enabling private, low-cost error screening in real-world translation pipelines. All datasets, prompts, and scripts are publicly available at our GitHub repository. |
| title | How Small Can You Go? Compact Language Models for On-Device Critical Error Detection in Machine Translation |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09748 |