Challenge: Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) aims for arbitrary translations across multiple languages.
Approach: They propose a method that inserts a set of tokens specifying the target language into the input sequence between the source and target tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on a large-scale benchmark.

Similar Papers

Building Multilingual Machine Translation Systems That Serve Arbitrary XY Translations (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) systems are often limited to many-to-one directions and suffer from poor performance in one-to one directions.
Approach: They propose to build multilingual machine translation systems that serve arbitrary X-Y directions while leveraging multilinguality with a two-stage training strategy of pretraining and finetuning.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baseline bilingual models and pivot translation models in most directions without the need for architecture change or extra data collection.
The Effects of Language Token Prefixing for Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.aacl-short)

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Challenge: In recent years, the field has moved towards large neural models either translating from or into many languages.
Approach: They propose to prefix language tokens onto a source or target sequence to improve translation performance.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve translation performance and source side prefixes improve translation.
Multilingual Agreement for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing models that only use auxiliary languages to encourage multilingual agreement ignore the relationships between different language pairs.
Approach: They propose a multilingual agreement-based method which explicitly models the agreement between different translation directions by randomly substituting some fragments of the source language with their counterpart translations of auxiliary languages.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on the multilingual translation task of 10 language pairs.
Multimodal Neural Machine Translation: A Survey of the State of the Art (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) is a task that aims to translate text into the target language using neural networks.
Approach: They propose to integrate other modalities with textual data to enhance translation performance.
Outcome: The proposed task aims to integrate visual modality with textual data to improve translation quality.
Neuron-Level Language Tag Injection Improves Zero-Shot Translation Performance (2025.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Language tagging is a method that trains models on specific language directions . injection is based on a language token embedded in the input layer .
Approach: They propose a method whereby source and target inputs are prefixed with a unique language token and inject it into the input of every linear layer.
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation performance with up to 2+ BLEU score point gain for certain language directions in a multilingual dataset.
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: Can Linguistic Hierarchies Help? (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) trains a single model that supports translation between multiple languages . transferring knowledge from a diverse set of languages degrades the translation performance due to negative transfer.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical knowledge distillation approach to train multilingual models . they use typological features and phylogeny to overcome negative transfer issue .
Outcome: The proposed approach avoids negative transfer effect by capitalising on language groups generated according to typological features and phylogeny of languages.
Learn and Consolidate: Continual Adaptation for Zero-Shot and Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing multilingual neural machine translation models perform poorly on language pairs with no parallel corpus.
Approach: They propose a two-stage approach that encourages original models to acquire language-agnostic multilingual representations from new data and preserves the model architecture without introducing parameters.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves performance in translation directions where existing models are weak and mitigates degeneration in the well-performing translation directions, offering flexibility in the real-world scenario.
Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing pre-training methods are not effective for machine translation tasks.
Approach: They propose a method to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model . they use random aligned substitution technique to bring words and phrases with similar meanings closer in the representation space.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves translation quality on low, medium, rich resource languages.
Multimodal Neural Machine Translation Using Synthetic Images Transformed by Latent Diffusion Model (2023.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Existing methods to translate source language sentences using images are not optimal for machine translation.
Approach: They propose a new multimodal neural machine translation model using synthetic images transformed by a latent diffusion model.
Outcome: The proposed model improves translation performance on English-German translation tasks using the Multi30k dataset.
Leveraging Synthetic Targets for Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Using synthetic target data, training models on synthetic targets outperforms training on actual ground-truth data.
Approach: They propose a recipe for training machine translation models on synthetic target data by leveraging a large pre-trained model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms training on real-world translation datasets.

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