# TreePrompt: Leveraging Hierarchical Few-Shot Example Selection for Improved English-Persian and English-German Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03748/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [COMET: A Neural Framework for MT Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09025/) (2020)
- [How Good Are GPT Models at Machine Translation? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09210/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Model for Machine Translation: A Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07069/) (2023)
- [Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00710/) (2020)
- [Towards Making the Most of ChatGPT for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13780/) (2023)
- [The unreasonable effectiveness of few-shot learning for machine translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01398/) (2023)
- [Large language models effectively leverage document-level context for literary translation, but critical errors persist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03245/) (2023)
- [Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10266/) (2023)
- [Investigating the Translation Performance of a Large Multilingual Language Model: the Case of BLOOM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01911/) (2023)
- [(Perhaps) Beyond Human Translation: Harnessing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Translating Ultra-Long Literary Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11804/) (2024)
- [TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16379/) (2024)
- [MIZAN: A Large Persian-English Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02107/) (2018)
- [SiLLM: Large Language Models for Simultaneous Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13036/) (2024)
- [Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Prompt Engineering for Persian, English, and Russian Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08429/) (2024)
- [Low-Resource Machine Translation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM Prompting: A Study on the Mambai Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04809/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Machine Translation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01679/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have consistently demonstrated strong performance in machine translation, especially when guided by high-quality prompts. Few-shot prompting is an effective technique to improve translation quality; however, most existing example selection methods focus solely on query-to-example similarity and do not account for the quality of the examples. In this work, we propose TreePrompt, a novel example selection approach that learns LLM preferences to identify high-quality, contextually relevant examples within a tree-structured framework. To further explore the balance between similarity and quality, we combine TreePrompt with K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) and Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (AFSP). Evaluations on two language pairs - English-Persian (MIZAN) and English-German (WMT19) - show that integrating TreePrompt with AFSP or Random selection leads to improved translation performance.