$M^2PO$: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation

Abstract

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is pivotal for Machine Translation (MT), yet current approaches are often hindered by misleading reward signals. Our analysis reveals that prevailing Quality Estimation (QE) models exhibit a systematic blind spot toward partial errors, specifically partial hallucinations and omissions, often favoring superficially fluent but unfaithful translations. To address this issue, we propose $M^2PO$ (Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization), a data-centric framework for preference optimization in machine translation. First, to correct the bias toward fluency, $M^2PO$ uses a dual-perspective mechanism that decouples semantic fidelity from fluency and prioritizes faithfulness through a curriculum strategy. Second, after correcting this bias, partial errors fall between perfect and severely incorrect translations, making them difficult to learn through standard best-versus-worst comparisons. We therefore introduce a multi-pair objective that leverages the full candidate list to capture these fine-grained error signals. Experiments on WMT23, WMT24, and FLORES-200 show that $M^2PO$ enables a 9B model to outperform leading open-source baselines and achieve parity with proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash, demonstrating strong potential for efficient and high-fidelity LLM-based translation. Our code and dataset will be released.