Qwen-MT-Lumen at WMT2026: Instruction-Specialized Translation via Quality-Aware Training and On-Policy Distillation

Abstract:We present Lumen, The open-source model is available at, our submission to the WMT 2026 General Machine Translation Shared Task. We focus on instruction-specialized translation, where systems must produce accurate translations while satisfying fine-grained requirements on style, terminology, and structured output. Lumen follows a four-stage pipeline. First, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning jointly strengthen multilingual translation competence and the ability to follow translation-specific instructions, such as terminology, style, and format constraints. Second, we extend the originally offline M^{2}PO preference-optimization framework into an online preference-optimization stage: the current policy samples candidate translations, an LLM judge assigns continuous direct-assessment scores, and the resulting multi-pair preferences are used to update the model. Third, on-policy distillation transfers stronger translation-instruction-following behavior from a larger teacher model to the Qwen3-14B student, improving translation-instruction adherence while retaining a 14B primary translation backbone. Finally, structure-aware inference and postprocessing preserve required formats, while selective repair addresses clear structural or decoding failures before submission. We participate in 23 translation directions. Under an absolute 1--5 LLM-judge rubric that evaluates translation-instruction following and translation quality separately, Lumen reaches an overall mean score of 4.60. Despite using a 14B translation backbone, it achieves performance comparable to leading proprietary systems in both translation quality and translation-instruction following.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.19758 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.19758v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.19758 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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