Early-Exit and Instant Confidence Translation Quality Estimation
Authors: name: Vilém Zouhar; name: Maike Züfle; name: Beni Egressy; name: Julius Cheng; name: Jan Niehues
Published: 2025-02-20 10:27:13

Abstract: Quality estimation is omnipresent in machine translation, for both evaluation
and generation. Unfortunately, quality estimation models are often opaque and
computationally expensive, making them impractical to be part of large-scale
pipelines. In this work, we tackle two connected challenges: (1) reducing the
cost of quality estimation at scale, and (2) developing an inexpensive
uncertainty estimation method for quality estimation. To address the latter, we
introduce Instant Confidence COMET, an uncertainty-aware quality estimation
model that matches the performance of previous approaches at a fraction of
their costs. We extend this to Early-Exit COMET, a quality estimation model
that can compute quality scores and associated confidences already at early
model layers, allowing us to early-exit computations and reduce evaluation
costs. We also apply our model to machine translation reranking. We combine
Early-Exit COMET with an upper confidence bound bandit algorithm to find the
best candidate from a large pool without having to run the full evaluation
model on all candidates. In both cases (evaluation and reranking) our methods
reduce the required compute by 50% with very little degradation in performance.