Zhengmian Hu, Tong Zheng, Vignesh Viswanathan, Ziyi Chen, Ryan A. Rossi, Yihan Wu, Dinesh Manocha, Heng Huang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where, when generating each token, a small draft model generates multiple drafts, and the target LLM verifies them in parallel, ensuring that the final output conforms to the target model distribution. The two main design choices in MDSD are the draft sampling method and the verification algorithm. For a fixed draft sampling method, the optimal acceptance rate is a solution to an optimal transport problem, but the complexity of this problem makes it difficult to solve for the optimal acceptance rate and measure the gap between existing verification algorithms and the theoretical upper bound. This paper discusses the dual of the optimal transport problem, providing a way to efficiently compute the optimal acceptance rate. For the first time, we measure the theoretical upper bound of MDSD efficiency for vocabulary sizes in the thousands and quantify the gap between existing verification algorithms and this bound. We also compare different draft sampling methods based on their optimal acceptance rates. Our results show that the draft sampling method strongly influences the optimal acceptance rate, with sampling without replacement outperforming sampling with replacement. Additionally, existing verification algorithms do not reach the theoretical upper bound for both without replacement and with replacement sampling. Our findings suggest that carefully designed draft sampling methods can potentially improve the optimal acceptance rate and enable the development of verification algorithms that closely match the theoretical upper bound.
Yingfeng Luo Northeastern University, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang Northeastern University, Tong Zheng, Bei Li Meituan 等 12 位作者
Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT), yet scaling to many languages while keeping quality robust across directions remains challenging.In this paper, we identify a failure mode of multilingual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on multi-way parallel data: when such data are reused symmetrically around a pivot language (e.g., English), performance on reverse directions (X \to pivot) can drop substantially.We term this phenomenon Directional Degeneration and attribute it to excessive many-to-one mappings, which encourage shortcut learning.We propose Strategic Downsampling (SD), a simple yet effective method to mitigate this degeneration.In addition, we introduce Parallel Multilingual Prompting (PMP), which augments translation instructions with an auxiliary parallel sentence to promote cross-lingual transfer during training and enables optional test-time enhancement when auxiliary translations are available. We further develop NiuTrans.LMT (Large-scale Multilingual Translation, abbreviated as LMT), a Chinese–English-centric suite of multilingual translation models spanning four sizes (0.6B/1.7B/4B/8B) and covering 60 languages and 234 directions.Comprehensive evaluations show that LMT is competitive among open-source MMT systems, and that our 4B LMT model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. We release our models and project resources to support inclusive and scalable MMT.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Relation extraction (RE) is a core task in natural language processing. Traditional approaches typically frame RE as a supervised learning problem, directly mapping context to labels—an approach that often suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Inspired by the workflow of human annotators, we reframe RE as a reasoning task guided by annotation guidelines and introduce R1-RE, the first reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) framework for RE tasks. Our method elicits the reasoning abilities of small language models for annotation tasks, resulting in significantly improved OOD robustness. We evaluate our approach on the public Sem-2010 dataset and a private MDKG dataset. The R1-RE-7B model attains an average OOD accuracy of approximately 70%, on par with leading proprietary models such as GPT-4o. Additionally, our comprehensive analysis provides novel insights into the training dynamics and emergent reasoning behaviors of the RLVR paradigm for RE.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表