Papers › Trans-Zero: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation...

Trans-Zero: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data

20 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.14669archive 2025-07-28

Wei Zou, Sen yang, Yu Bao, ShuJian Huang, Jiajun Chen, Shanbo Cheng

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped machine translation (MT), but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), facing challenges like data scarcity for low-resource languages and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose TRANS-ZERO, a self-play framework that leverages only monolingual data and the intrinsic multilingual knowledge of LLM. TRANS-ZERO combines Genetic Monte-Carlo Tree Search (G-MCTS) with preference optimization, achieving strong translation performance that rivals supervised methods. Experiments demonstrate that this approach not only matches the performance of models trained on large-scale parallel data but also excels in non-English translation directions. Further analysis reveals that G-MCTS itself significantly enhances translation quality by exploring semantically consistent candidates through iterative translations, providing a robust foundation for the framework's succuss.

PaperPDFCode

Code

njunlp/trans0 officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine TranslationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections