We propose a post-training method for lower-resource languages that preserves fluency of language models even when aligned by disfluent reward models. Preference-optimization is now a well-researched topic, but previous work has mostly addressed models for English and Chinese. Lower-resource languages lack both datasets written by native speakers and language models capable of generating fluent synthetic data. Thus, in this work, we focus on developing a fluent preference-aligned language model without any instruction-tuning data in the target language. Our approach uses an on-policy training method, which we compare with two common approaches: supervised finetuning on machine-translated data and multilingual finetuning. We conduct a case study on Norwegian Bokmål and evaluate fluency through native-speaker assessments. The results show that the on-policy aspect is crucial and outperforms the alternatives without relying on any hard-to-obtain data.

This proposed tutorial focuses on Healthcare Domain Applications of NLP, what we have achieved around HealthcareNLP, and the challenges that lie ahead for the future. Existing reviews in this domain either overlook some important tasks, such as synthetic data generation for addressing privacy concerns, or explainable clinical NLP for improved integration and implementation, or fail to mention important methodologies, including retrieval augmented generation and the neural symbolic integration of LLMs and KGs. In light of this, the goal of this tutorial is to provide an introductory overview of the most important sub-areas of a patient- and resource-oriented HealthcareNLP, with three layers of hierarchy: data/resource layer: annotation guidelines, ethical approvals, governance, synthetic data; NLP-Eval layer: NLP tasks such as NER, RE, sentiment analysis, and linking/coding with categorised methods, leading to explainable HealthAI; patients layer: Patient Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE), health literacy, translation, simplification, and summarisation (also NLP tasks), and shared decision-making support. A hands-on session will be included in the tutorial for the audience to use HealthcareNLP applications. The target audience includes NLP practitioners in the healthcare application domain, NLP researchers who are interested in domain applications, healthcare researchers, and students from NLP fields. The type of tutorial is "Introductory to CL/NLP topics (HealthcareNLP)" and the audience does not need prior knowledge to attend this. Tutorial materials: https://github.com/4dpicture/HealthNLP

Interpretability can be implemented as a means to understand decisions taken by (black box) models, such as machine translation (MT) or large language models (LLMs). Yet, research in this area has been limited in relation to a manifested problem in these models: gender bias. With this research, we aim to move away from simply measuring bias to exploring its origins. Working with gender-ambiguous natural source data, this study examines which context, in the form of input tokens in the source sentence, influences (or triggers) the translation model choice of a certain gender inflection in the target language. To analyse this, we use contrastive explanations and compute saliency attribution. We first address the challenge of a lacking scoring threshold and specifically examine different attribution levels of source words on the model gender decisions in the translation. We compare salient source words with human perceptions of gender and demonstrate a noticeable overlap between human perceptions and model attribution. Additionally, we provide a linguistic analysis of salient words. Our work showcases the relevance of understanding model translation decisions in terms of gender, how this compares to human decisions and that this information should be leveraged to mitigate gender bias.

The goal of this work is to develop a universal approach for aligning subtitles (i.e., spoken language text with corresponding timestamps) to continuous sign language videos. Prior approaches typically rely on end-to-end training tied to a specific language or dataset, which limits their generality. In contrast, our method Segment, Embed, and Align (SEA) provides a single framework that works across multiple languages and domains. SEA leverages two pretrained models: the first to segment a video frame sequence into individual signs and the second to embed the video clip of each sign into a shared latent space with text. Alignment is subsequently performed with a lightweight dynamic programming procedure that runs efficiently on CPUs within a minute, even for hour-long episodes. SEA is flexible and can adapt to a wide range of scenarios, utilizing resources from small lexicons to large continuous corpora. Experiments on four sign language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art alignment performance, highlighting the potential of SEA to generate high-quality parallel data for advancing sign language processing. SEA's code and models are openly available.

AI research agents offer the promise to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. However, the field is still in its infancy, and the key factors driving the success or failure of agent trajectories are not fully understood. We examine the role that ideation diversity plays in agent performance. First, we analyse agent trajectories on MLE-bench, a well-known benchmark to evaluate AI research agents, across different models and agent scaffolds. Our analysis reveals that different models and agent scaffolds yield varying degrees of ideation diversity, and that higher-performing agents tend to have increased ideation diversity. Further, we run a controlled experiment where we modify the degree of ideation diversity, demonstrating that higher ideation diversity results in stronger performance. Finally, we strengthen our results by examining additional evaluation metrics beyond the standard medal-based scoring of MLE-bench, showing that our findings still hold across other agent performance metrics.

Abstract--This paper introduces SENSE (Shared Embedding for N-lingual Speech and tExt), an open-source solution inspired by the SAMU-XLSR framework and conceptually similar to Meta AI's SONAR models. These approaches rely on a teacher-student framework to align a self-supervised speech encoder with the language-agnostic continuous representations of a text encoder at the utterance level. We describe how the original SAMU-XLSR method has been updated by selecting a stronger teacher text model and a better initial speech encoder . The source code for training and using SENSE models has been integrated into the SpeechBrain toolkit, and the first SENSE model we trained has been publicly released. We report experimental results on multilingual and multimodal semantic tasks, where our SENSE model achieves highly competitive performance. Finally, this study offers new insights into how semantics are captured in such semantically aligned speech encoders. Speech foundation models based on self-supervised learning (SSL) have brought significant advances in speech processing. These models, such as wav2vec 2.0 [1], HuBERT [2], and WavLM [3], generate learned speech representations that can be applied to a wide range of downstream speech processing tasks. By training on large amounts of unlabelled speech data, SSL models have demonstrated the ability to capture crucial speech features, such as phonemes and other acoustic units [4]. This capability has led to significant progress in multiple downstream tasks, including speech recognition [1], speech translation [5], speech separation, speaker verification, speaker diarization [3], and emotion detection [6]. Different approaches have been proposed to pretrain model by aligning speech and text, like mSLAM [7], a Massively multilingual joint pre-training for speech and text.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resource languages. However, their effectiveness diminishes significantly in the contexts of low-resource languages. Current multilingual enhancement methods are often limited to text modality or rely solely on machine translation. While such approaches help models acquire basic linguistic capabilities and produce "thin descriptions", they neglect the importance of multimodal informativeness and cultural groundedness, both of which are crucial for serving low-resource language users effectively. To bridge this gap, in this study, we identify two significant objectives for a truly effective MLLM in low-resource language settings, namely 1) linguistic capability and 2) cultural groundedness, placing special emphasis on cultural awareness. To achieve these dual objectives, we propose a dual-source strategy that guides the collection of data tailored to each goal, sourcing native web alt-text for culture and MLLM-generated captions for linguistics. As a concrete implementation, we introduce MELLA, a multimodal, multilingual dataset. Experiment results show that after fine-tuning on MELLA, there is a general performance improvement for the eight languages on various MLLM backbones, with models producing "thick descriptions". We verify that the performance gains are from both cultural knowledge enhancement and linguistic capability enhancement. Our dataset can be found at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus.

Despite Telugu being spoken by over 80 million people, speech translation research for this morphologically rich language remains severely underexplored. We address this gap by developing a high-quality Telugu--English speech translation benchmark from 46 hours of manually verified CSTD corpus data (30h/8h/8h train/dev/test split). Our systematic comparison of cascaded versus end-to-end architectures shows that while IndicWhisper + IndicMT achieves the highest performance due to extensive Telugu-specific training data, finetuned SeamlessM4T models demonstrate remarkable competitiveness despite using significantly less Telugu-specific training data. This finding suggests that with careful hyperparameter tuning and sufficient parallel data (potentially less than 100 hours), end-to-end systems can achieve performance comparable to cascaded approaches in low-resource settings. Our metric reliability study evaluating BLEU, METEOR, ChrF++, ROUGE-L, TER, and BERTScore against human judgments reveals that traditional metrics provide better quality discrimination than BERTScore for Telugu--English translation. The work delivers three key contributions: a reproducible Telugu--English benchmark, empirical evidence of competitive end-to-end performance potential in low-resource scenarios, and practical guidance for automatic evaluation in morphologically complex language pairs.

As software systems evolve, developers increasingly work across multiple programming languages and often face the need to migrate code from one language to another. While automatic code translation offers a promising solution, it has long remained a challenging task. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential for this task, yet existing approaches remain limited in accuracy and fail to effectively leverage contextual and structural cues within the code. Prior work has explored translation and repair mechanisms, but lacks a structured, agentic framework where multiple specialized agents collaboratively improve translation quality. In this work, we introduce BabelCoder, an agentic framework that performs code translation by decomposing the task into specialized agents for translation, testing, and refinement, each responsible for a specific aspect such as generating code, validating correctness, or repairing errors. We evaluate BabelCoder on four benchmark datasets and compare it against four state-of-the-art baselines. BabelCoder outperforms existing methods by 0.5%-13.5% in 94% of cases, achieving an average accuracy of 94.16%.

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) systems stream in audio while simultaneously emitting translated text or speech. Such systems face the significant challenge of balancing translation quality and latency. We introduce a strategy to optimize this tradeoff: wait for more input only if you gain information by doing so. Based on this strategy, we present Regularized Entropy INformation Adaptation (REINA), a novel loss to train an adaptive policy using an existing non-streaming translation model. We derive REINA from information theory principles and show that REINA helps push the reported Pareto frontier of the latency/quality tradeoff over prior works. Utilizing REINA, we train a SimulST model on French, Spanish and German, both from and into English. Training on only open source or synthetically generated data, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOT A) streaming results for models of comparable size. We also introduce a metric for streaming efficiency, quantitatively showing REINA improves the latency/quality trade-off by as much as 21 percent compared to prior approaches, normalized against non-streaming baseline BLEU scores.