We present the Johns Hopkins University’s submission to the 2025 IWSLT Low-Resource Task. We competed on all 10 language pairs. Our approach centers around ensembling methods – specifically Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding. We find that such ensembling often improves performance only slightly over the best performing stand-alone model, and that in some cases it can even hurt performance slightly.

Pretrained language models are integral part of AI applications, but their high computational cost for training limits accessibility. Initiatives such as Bloom and StarCoder aim to democratize access to pretrained models for collaborative community development. Despite these efforts, such models encounter challenges such as limited multilingual capabilities, risks of catastrophic forgetting during continual pretraining, and the high costs of training models from scratch, alongside the need to align with AI safety standards and regulatory frameworks. This paper presents Aurora-M, a 15B parameter multilingual open-source model trained on English, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese, and code. Continually pretrained from StarCoderPlus on 435B additional tokens, Aurora-M surpasses 2T tokens in total training token count. It is the first open-source multilingual model fine-tuned on human-reviewed safety instructions, thus aligning its development not only with conventional red-teaming considerations, but also with the specific concerns articulated in the Biden-Harris Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. We evaluate Aurora-M across a wide range of tasks and languages, showcasing its robustness against catastrophic forgetting and its superior performance in multilingual settings, particularly in safety evaluations. We open-source Aurora-M and its variants to encourage responsible open-source development of large language models at https://huggingface.co/aurora-m.

We have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal data on numerous social media platforms. Conventional studies typically require massive labeled data to train models for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA). However, collecting and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for MABSA is tough. To alleviate the above issue, we perform three MABSA-related tasks with quite a small number of labeled multimodal samples. We first build diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets according to the data distribution. To capture the specific prompt for each aspect term in a few-shot scenario, we propose a novel Generative Multimodal Prompt (GMP) model for MABSA, which includes the Multimodal Encoder module and the N-Stream Decoders module. We further introduce a subtask to predict the number of aspect terms in each instance to construct the multimodal prompt. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines on two MABSA-related tasks in the few-shot setting.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to infer complex semantic relations among entities in a document. Distant supervision (DS) is able to generate massive auto-labeled data, which can improve DocRE performance. Recent works leverage pseudo labels generated by the pre-denoising model to reduce noise in DS data. However, unreliable pseudo labels bring new noise, e.g., adding false pseudo labels and losing correct DS labels. Therefore, how to select effective pseudo labels to denoise DS data is still a challenge in document-level distant relation extraction. To tackle this issue, we introduce uncertainty estimation technology to determine whether pseudo labels can be trusted. In this work, we propose a Document-level distant Relation Extraction framework with Uncertainty Guided label denoising, UGDRE. Specifically, we propose a novel instance-level uncertainty estimation method, which measures the reliability of the pseudo labels with overlapping relations. By further considering the long-tail problem, we design dynamic uncertainty thresholds for different types of relations to filter high-uncertainty pseudo labels. We conduct experiments on two public datasets. Our framework outperforms strong baselines by 1.91 F1 and 2.28 Ign F1 on the RE-DocRED dataset.

In this document we present an end-to-end machine reading comprehension system that solves multiple choice questions with a textual entailment perspective. Since some of the knowledge required is not explicitly mentioned in the text, we try to exploit commonsense knowledge by using pretrained word embeddings during contextual embeddings and by dynamically generating a weighted representation of related script knowledge. In the model two kinds of prediction structure are ensembled, and the final accuracy of our system is 10 percent higher than the naiive baseline.