This paper presents a study on strategies to enhance the translation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of machine translation (MT) tasks. The paper proposes a novel paradigm consisting of three stages: Secondary Pre-training using Extensive Monolingual Data, Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, and Leveraging Source-Language Consistent Instruction for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Previous research on LLMs focused on various strategies for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), but their effectiveness has been limited. While traditional machine translation approaches rely on vast amounts of parallel bilingual data, our paradigm highlights the importance of using smaller sets of high-quality bilingual data. We argue that the focus should be on augmenting LLMs' cross-lingual alignment abilities during pre-training rather than solely relying on extensive bilingual data during SFT. Experimental results conducted using the Llama2 model, particularly on Chinese-Llama2 after monolingual augmentation, demonstrate the improved translation capabilities of LLMs. A significant contribution of our approach lies in Stage2: Continual Pre-training with Interlinear Text Format Documents, which requires less than 1B training data, making our method highly efficient. Additionally, in Stage3, we observed that setting instructions consistent with the source language benefits the supervised fine-tuning process. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous work and achieves superior performance compared to models such as NLLB-54B and GPT3.5-text-davinci-003, despite having a significantly smaller parameter count of only 7B or 13B. This achievement establishes our method as a pioneering strategy in the field of machine translation.

本文介绍了一项关于增强大型语言模型（LLMs）在机器翻译（MT）任务中翻译能力的研究，提出了一个包括三个阶段的新范 Paradigm，通过使用大量的单语数据进行二次预训练、使用互译文本格式文档进行连续预训练，以及利用和源语言一致的指导来进行监督微调。实验结果表明，我们的方法在翻译能力方面取得了显著的改进，超过了以前的工作，并在参数数量较小的情况下实现了优越的性能。

增强大型语言模型的翻译能力的新范式