ReflectMT: Internalizing Reflection for Efficient and High-Quality Machine Translation
Kunquan Li, Yingxue Zhang, Zhibin Lan, Fandong Meng, Jinsong Su
原文摘要
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in applying Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to Machine Translation (MT). While most approaches adopt a 'pre-thinking' paradigm and benefit from explicit reasoning trajectories, they suffer from substantial inference cost and latency. To address these limitations, we propose ReflectMT, a two-stage reflection internalization framework for machine translation that employs a 'post-thinking' paradigm. Our approach develops the model's 'translate-reflect-refine' capability through reinforcement learning. In the first stage, we cultivate the model's capacity for high-quality reflection and refinement, thereby enhancing its semantic comprehension and task-specific knowledge. In the second stage, we train the model to internalize the knowledge acquired during reflection. On WMT24, ReflectMT achieves a GPT-4o-based GRF score of 86.16, outperforming DeepSeek-R1 (84.03) by 2.13 points, while using approximately 92% fewer output tokens. Independent automatic evaluation, a blinded human evaluation, and preliminary experiments on three additional translation directions provide further evidence for the framework's effectiveness.
cs.CL