{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/early-exit-and-instant-confidence-translation","title":"Early-Exit and Instant Confidence Translation Quality Estimation","arxiv_id":"2502.14429","date":"2025-02-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Vilém Zouhar","Maike Züfle","Beni Egressy","Julius Cheng","Jan Niehues"],"abstract":"Quality estimation is omnipresent in machine translation, for both evaluation and generation. Unfortunately, quality estimation models are often opaque and computationally expensive, making them impractical to be part of large-scale pipelines. In this work, we tackle two connected challenges: (1) reducing the cost of quality estimation at scale, and (2) developing an inexpensive uncertainty estimation method for quality estimation. To address the latter, we introduce Instant Confidence COMET, an uncertainty-aware quality estimation model that matches the performance of previous approaches at a fraction of their costs. We extend this to Early-Exit COMET, a quality estimation model that can compute quality scores and associated confidences already at early model layers, allowing us to early-exit computations and reduce evaluation costs. We also apply our model to machine translation reranking. We combine Early-Exit COMET with an upper confidence bound bandit algorithm to find the best candidate from a large pool without having to run the full evaluation model on all candidates. In both cases (evaluation and reranking) our methods reduce the required compute by 50% with very little degradation in performance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14429v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14429v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"early-exit-and-instant-confidence-translation","repo_url":"https://github.com/zouharvi/COMET-early-exit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"reranking","task_name":"Reranking"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}