CAT-Translate: Building Compact Open-Source Models for Japanese-English Translation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21413v1
• Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:28:59 GMT
• Title: CAT-Translate: Building Compact Open-Source Models for Japanese-English Translation
• Abstract summary: We develop a family of small language models (0.8B, 1.4B, 3.3B, and 7B parameters) specialized for Japanese-English bidirectional translation.<n>We evaluate our models on WMT and real-world translation benchmarks across business, legal, medical, financial, and patent domains.
• Score: 16.295305195753723
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Nowadays, large multilingual translation models demonstrate impressive translation capabilities in the machine translation benchmarks. This raises a practical question to the developers: is it worth developing translation models specialized for a particular language pair if you only need to support that language pair? To give an anecdotal answer to this question, we develop a family of small language models (0.8B, 1.4B, 3.3B, and 7B parameters) specialized for Japanese-English bidirectional translation. We employ a two-stage supervised fine-tuning approach followed by Multi-Objective GRPO (Ichihara et al. 2025) to train models on synthetically generated parallel corpora. We evaluate our models on WMT and real-world translation benchmarks across business, legal, medical, financial, and patent domains. While multilingual models achieve strong performance on WMT benchmarks, our compact models outperform them on real-world benchmarks, suggesting the practical utility of developing specialized translation models even in the era of large multilingual models.

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