Cross-Preference Learning for Sentence-Level and Context-Aware Machine Translation

Abstract:Context-aware machine translation (MT) leverages document-level information, yet it does not consistently outperform sentence-level MT, as contextual signals are unevenly beneficial across sentences. Existing training objectives do not explicitly model this variability, limiting a model's ability to adaptively exploit context. In this paper, we propose Cross-Preference Learning (CPL), a preference-based training framework that explicitly captures the complementary benefits of sentence-level and context-aware MT. CPL achieves this by integrating both intra- and cross-condition preferences into the preference optimization objective, providing explicit supervision to exploit informative context while remaining robust to uninformative context. We validate the proposed approach on several public context-aware MT tasks using multiple models, including Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3-8B-Instruct. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in translation quality and robustness across both input conditions, achieved without any architectural modifications.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2603.25183 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2603.25183v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.25183 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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