Haoran Wei
Author directory2026
Lumen at WMT2026: Instruction-Specialized Translation via Quality-Aware Training and On-Policy Distillation
Hao Wang | Yangyang Liu | Xiaohu Zhao | Heng Liu | Zifu Shang | Tianhao Li | Ruize Gao | Jialong Tang | Shiao Shao | Haoran Wei | Baosong Yang | Linlong Xu | Longyue Wang | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
Hao Wang | Yangyang Liu | Xiaohu Zhao | Heng Liu | Zifu Shang | Tianhao Li | Ruize Gao | Jialong Tang | Shiao Shao | Haoran Wei | Baosong Yang | Linlong Xu | Longyue Wang | Weihua Luo
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Machine Translation
We present Lumen, our submission to the WMT2026 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.