Papers for

natural language processing platform teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Expert pruning improves model compression for machine translation

ESTS at WMT26: Routing-Informed Expert Pruning for Model Compression

Abstract: We describe six submissions under the team name ESTS to the unconstrained WMT26 Model Compression Shared Task for English--Simplified Chinese and English--Egyptian Arabic. We submit three compression operating points per translation direction, all derived from GPT-OSS-20B. We use task-specific routing mass to rank experts and cross-lingual routing divergence to allocate retained capacity across layers, then physically remove low-importance experts. The resulting specialists are recovery-tuned on GPT-5.1-generated synthetic translation data and further compressed by applying MXFP4 quantization to the retained expert projection weights. We additionally implement a robust inference system for the instruction-conditioned WMT26 setting, including category inference, output validation, retries, segmented fallback, and source-owned JSON reconstruction. Across our six submissions, parameter counts range from 4.186B to 7.770B and packed artifact sizes from 4.55 to 6.33~GiB. Internal xCOMET-XL evaluation using GPT-5.1 pseudo-references provides an internal comparison across the submitted compression operating points.

Fri 11 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Machine translation models can be very large and slow. The team named ESTS developed a way to shrink large translation models by identifying and removing less important pieces called experts. They then fine-tune the smaller models on synthetic translation examples to keep quality high and use special compression techniques to make the models smaller. Their method allows for different sizes of compressed models and improved robustness when translating between English, Simplified Chinese, and Egyptian Arabic. They also created a system to help manage various challenges during translation inference.
Open 2609.12310v1