Next Seminar
xCOMET, Tower, EuroLLM: Open & Multilingual LLMs for Europe
Tuesday, 25 February 13:00 - 14:00 WET
Abstract:
Today, LLMs are Swiss knives and machine translation (MT) one of their tools. Is this the end of MT research? In this talk, I argue that the connection between LLM and MT research is two-way. I present some of our recent work advancing multilingual LLMs, tools to estimate their quality, and how the two can be combined for test-time scaling.
First, I present xCOMET, an open-source learned metric which integrates sentence-level evaluation and error span detection, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance across all types of meta-evaluation (sentence-level, system-level, and error span detection). Moreover, it does so while highlighting and categorizing error spans, thus enriching the quality assessment.
Then, I present Tower, a suite of open multilingual LLMs for translation-related tasks. Tower models are created through continued pretraining on a carefully curated multilingual mixture of monolingual and parallel data. The combination of Tower with COMET reranking obtained the best results in 8 out of 11 language pairs in the WMT General Translation shared task, according to human evaluation.
Finally, I describe EuroLLM, an ongoing EU-made project whose goal is to train an open multilingual LLM from scratch using the European HPC infrastructure (EuroHPC). The last release (EuroLLM-9B) supports 35 languages, including all 24 official EU languages, and it achieves strong results in various benchmarks, comparable or better than the best existing models of similar size.
Register here on EventBrite.
The Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminars are a series of informal meetings which occur every two weeks at Instituto Superior Técnico, in Lisbon. It works as a discussion forum involving different research groups, from IST and elsewhere. Its participants are interested in areas such as (but not limited to): statistical machine learning, signal processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, computational biology, neural networks, control systems, reinforcement learning, or anything related (even if vaguely) with machine learning.
The seminars last for about one hour (including time for discussion and questions) and revolve around the general topic of Machine Learning. The speaker is a volunteer who decides the topic of his/her presentation. Past seminars have included presentations about state-of-the-art research, surveys and tutorials, practicing a conference talk, presenting a challenging problem and asking for help, and illustrating an interesting application of Machine Learning such as a prototype or finished product.
Presenters can have any background: undergrads, graduate students, academic researchers, company staff, etc. Anyone is welcome both to attend the seminar as well as to present it. Occasionally we will have invited speakers. Browse the archive (on the left) for a list of all past seminars, including the speakers, titles, abstracts and, whenever possible, the video and/or slides from the presentation.
Note: The seminars are held at lunch-time, and include delicious free food.
Feel free to join our mailing list, where seminar topics are announced beforehand. You may also visit the group webpage. Anyone can attend the seminars. If you would like to present something, please send us an email.
The seminars were usually held every other Tuesday, from 1 PM to 2 PM, at the IST campus in Alameda. This sometimes changes due to availability of the speakers, so check regularly!
Meanwhile please check some of the last seminars in Priberam’s YouTube channel.