Code & Corpus at WMT 2026: Checkpoint-Pool Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Arabic-Hindi and Arabic-Bangla Translation

Raman Yadav, Alapan Kuila


Abstract
We present a constrained submission to the WMT 2026 Low-Resource Arabic-Asian Language Translation shared task for Arabic–Hindi and Arabic–Bangla translation. Our system fine-tunes the NLLB-200 distilled 600M model jointly on all four translation directions using the official task data. At inference, instead of relying on a single best checkpoint, we retain multiple training checkpoints and generate candidate translations from each checkpoint. We then apply checkpoint-pool Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding with chrF as the utility function to select the final translation. This approach exploits diversity across training checkpoints without additional training runs. On the official evaluation, our primary system ranked 4th of 8 for Hindi→Arabic, 3rd of 6 for Bangla→Arabic, 3rd of 10 for Arabic→Hindi, and 2nd of 7 for Arabic→Bangla.
Anthology ID:
2026.wmt-main.177
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Barry Haddow, Tom Kocmi, Philipp Koehn, Christof Monz
Venues:
WMT | WS
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2344–2350
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.177/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raman Yadav and Alapan Kuila. 2026. Code & Corpus at WMT 2026: Checkpoint-Pool Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Arabic-Hindi and Arabic-Bangla Translation. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation, pages 2344–2350, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Code & Corpus at WMT 2026: Checkpoint-Pool Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Arabic-Hindi and Arabic-Bangla Translation (Yadav & Kuila, WMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wmt-main.177.pdf