Scarcity of labeled training data remains the long pole in the tent for building performant language technology and generative AI models. Transformer models -- particularly LLMs -- are increasingly being used to mitigate the data scarcity problem via synthetic data generation. However, because the models are black boxes, the properties of the synthetic data are difficult to predict. In practice it is common for language technology engineers to 'fiddle' with the LLM temperature setting and hope that what comes out the other end improves the downstream model. Faced with this uncertainty, here we propose Data Kernel Perspective Space (DKPS) to provide the foundation for mathematical analysis yielding concrete statistical guarantees for the quality of the outputs of transformer models. We first show the mathematical derivation of DKPS and how it provides performance guarantees. Next we show how DKPS performance guarantees can elucidate performance of a downstream task, such as neural machine translation models or LLMs trained using Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO). Limitations of the current work and future research are also discussed.

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.

Understanding reflection remains a long-standing challenge in 3D reconstruction due to the entanglement of appearance and geometry under view-dependent reflections. In this work, we present the Pygmalion Effect in Vision, a novel framework that metaphorically "sculpts" reflective objects into clay-like forms through image-to-clay translation. Inspired by the myth of Pygmalion, our method learns to suppress specular cues while preserving intrinsic geometric consistency, enabling robust reconstruction from multi-view images containing complex reflections. Specifically, we introduce a dual-branch network in which a BRDF-based reflective branch is complemented by a clay-guided branch that stabilizes geometry and refines surface normals. The two branches are trained jointly using the synthesized clay-like images, which provide a neutral, reflection-free supervision signal that complements the reflective views. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate substantial improvement in normal accuracy and mesh completeness over existing reflection-handling methods. Beyond technical gains, our framework reveals that seeing by unshining, translating radiance into neutrality, can serve as a powerful inductive bias for reflective object geometry learning.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

I do believe that problems are the heart of mathematics.

However, most end-to-end models struggle to outperform cascade models, i.e., a

This research article examines the effectiveness of various pretraining strategies for developing machine translation models tailored to low-resource languages. Although this work considers several low-resource languages, including Afrikaans, Swahili, and Zulu, the translation model is specifically developed for Lingala, an under-resourced African language, building upon the pretraining approach introduced by Reid and Artetxe (2021), originally designed for high-resource languages. Through a series of comprehensive experiments, we explore different pretraining methodologies, including the integration of multiple languages and the use of both monolingual and parallel data during the pretraining phase. Our findings indicate that pretraining on multiple languages and leveraging both monolingual and parallel data significantly enhance translation quality. This study offers valuable insights into effective pretraining strategies for low-resource machine translation, helping to bridge the performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. The results contribute to the broader goal of developing more inclusive and accurate NLP models for marginalized communities and underrepresented populations. The code and datasets used in this study are publicly available to facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, with the exception of certain data that may no longer be accessible due to changes in public availability.

Quality estimation (QE) reranking is a form of quality-aware decoding which aims to improve machine translation (MT) by scoring and selecting the best candidate from a pool of generated translations. While known to be effective at the sentence level, its application to the increasingly prominent domain of document-level translation remains underexplored. In this work, we evaluate QE reranking performance on document-level (rather than the typical sentence-level) translation, using various learned and large language model (LLM)-based QE metrics. We find that with our best learned metric, SLIDE, BLEURT-20 scores improve by +2.00 with only two candidates, and by +5.09 with 32, across both decoder-only LLM models and encoder-decoder neural machine translation (NMT) models. Using the best LLM-based metric, GEMBA-DA, gains of +1.63 and +4.30 are achieved under the same conditions. Although gains shrink with longer inputs, reranking with 32 candidates yields improvements of +2.34 (SLIDE) and +1.40 (GEMBA-DA) on our longest documents (512-1024 source tokens). These findings demonstrate the practical value of document-level QE, with minimal runtime overhead given suitable translation models and hardware.