CompactQE: Interpretable Translation Quality Estimation via Small Open-Weight LLMs

Kamil Guttmann; Zofia Fraś; Artur Nowakowski; Krzysztof Jassem

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arXiv · 2605.15763

CompactQE: Interpretable Translation Quality Estimation via Small Open-Weight LLMs

Kamil Guttmann·Zofia Fraś·Artur Nowakowski·Krzysztof Jassem

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Abstract

Current state-of-the-art Quality Estimation (QE) in machine translation relies on massive, proprietary LLMs, raising data privacy concerns. We demonstrate that smaller, open-source LLMs (<30B parameters) are a viable, cost-effective and privacy-preserving alternative. Using a single-pass prompting strategy, our models simultaneously generate quality scores, MQM error annotations, suggested error corrections, and full post-editions. Our analysis shows these models achieve highly competitive system-level correlations with human judgments that outperform traditional neural metrics, fine-tuned models, and human inter-annotator agreement, effectively approximating the capabilities of much larger proprietary LLMs.

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Kamil Guttmann, Zofia Fraś, Artur Nowakowski, Krzysztof Jassem. 2026-05-15. CompactQE: Interpretable Translation Quality Estimation via Small Open-Weight LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15763

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