Parameter-Efficient Quality Estimation via Frozen Recursive Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Abubacar, Umar, Bauer, Roman, Kanojia, Diptesh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Abubacar, Umar
Bauer, Roman
Kanojia, Diptesh
author_facet Abubacar, Umar
Bauer, Roman
Kanojia, Diptesh
contents Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) achieve strong results on reasoning tasks through iterative refinement of a shared network. We investigate whether these recursive mechanisms transfer to Quality Estimation (QE) for low-resource languages using a three-phase methodology. Experiments on $8$ language pairs on a low-resource QE dataset reveal three findings. First, TRM's recursive mechanisms do not transfer to QE. External iteration hurts performance, and internal recursion offers only narrow benefits. Next, representation quality dominates architectural choices, and lastly, frozen pretrained embeddings match fine-tuned performance while reducing trainable parameters by 37$\times$ (7M vs 262M). TRM-QE with frozen XLM-R embeddings achieves a Spearman's correlation of 0.370, matching fine-tuned variants (0.369) and outperforming an equivalent-depth standard transformer (0.336). On Hindi and Tamil, frozen TRM-QE outperforms MonoTransQuest (560M parameters) with 80$\times$ fewer trainable parameters, suggesting that weight sharing combined with frozen embeddings enables parameter efficiency for QE. We release the code publicly for further research. Code is available at https://github.com/surrey-nlp/TRMQE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parameter-Efficient Quality Estimation via Frozen Recursive Models
Abubacar, Umar
Bauer, Roman
Kanojia, Diptesh
Computation and Language
Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) achieve strong results on reasoning tasks through iterative refinement of a shared network. We investigate whether these recursive mechanisms transfer to Quality Estimation (QE) for low-resource languages using a three-phase methodology. Experiments on $8$ language pairs on a low-resource QE dataset reveal three findings. First, TRM's recursive mechanisms do not transfer to QE. External iteration hurts performance, and internal recursion offers only narrow benefits. Next, representation quality dominates architectural choices, and lastly, frozen pretrained embeddings match fine-tuned performance while reducing trainable parameters by 37$\times$ (7M vs 262M). TRM-QE with frozen XLM-R embeddings achieves a Spearman's correlation of 0.370, matching fine-tuned variants (0.369) and outperforming an equivalent-depth standard transformer (0.336). On Hindi and Tamil, frozen TRM-QE outperforms MonoTransQuest (560M parameters) with 80$\times$ fewer trainable parameters, suggesting that weight sharing combined with frozen embeddings enables parameter efficiency for QE. We release the code publicly for further research. Code is available at https://github.com/surrey-nlp/TRMQE.
title Parameter-Efficient Quality Estimation via Frozen Recursive Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14593