Ensemble Self-Training for Unsupervised Machine Translation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17087v1
• Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:16:13 GMT
• Title: Ensemble Self-Training for Unsupervised Machine Translation
• Abstract summary: We present an ensemble-driven self-training framework for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT)<n>We train multiple UNMT models that share the same translation task but differ in an auxiliary language, inducing structured diversity across models.<n>Experiments show statistically significant improvements over single-model UNMT baselines, with mean gains of 1.7 chrF when translating from English and 0.67 chrF when translating into English.
• Score: 17.86909605285373
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We present an ensemble-driven self-training framework for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT). Starting from a primary language pair, we train multiple UNMT models that share the same translation task but differ in an auxiliary language, inducing structured diversity across models. We then generate pseudo-translations for the primary pair using token-level ensemble decoding, averaging model predictions in both directions. These ensemble outputs are used as synthetic parallel data to further train each model, allowing the models to improve via shared supervision. At deployment time, we select a single model by validation performance, preserving single-model inference cost. Experiments show statistically significant improvements over single-model UNMT baselines, with mean gains of 1.7 chrF when translating from English and 0.67 chrF when translating into English.

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