# NeoAMT: Neologism-Aware Agentic Machine Translation with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08417/) (2024)
- [xCOMET: Transparent Machine Translation Evaluation through Fine-grained Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10482/) (2023)
- [Tower: An Open Multilingual Large Language Model for Translation-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17733/) (2024)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [SimAlign: High Quality Word Alignments without Parallel Training Data using Static and Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08728/) (2020)
- [Aya 23: Open Weight Releases to Further Multilingual Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15032/) (2024)
- [Scaling up COMETKIWI: Unbabel-IST 2023 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11925/) (2023)
- [WMT24++: Expanding the Language Coverage of WMT24 to 55 Languages & Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12404/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Machine Translation with Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14328/) (2023)
- [MT-R1-Zero: Advancing LLM-based Machine Translation via R1-Zero-like Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10160/) (2025)
- [X-ALMA: Plug & Play Modules and Adaptive Rejection for Quality Translation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03115/) (2024)
- [DRT: Deep Reasoning Translation via Long Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17498/) (2024)
- [A Supervised Word Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction using Multilingual BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14516/) (2020)
- [NEO-BENCH: Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models with Neologisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12261/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding for Low-resource Languages with Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02490/) (2024)
- [SSR-Zero: Simple Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16637/) (2025)
- [ExTrans: Multilingual Deep Reasoning Translation via Exemplar-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12996/) (2025)
- [WSPAlign: Word Alignment Pre-training via Large-Scale Weakly Supervised Span Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05644/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Multi-lingual Positive Instances in Contrastive Learning to Improve Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08929/) (2023)
- [Test-Time Scaling of Reasoning Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06471/) (2025)
- [BinaryAlign: Word Alignment as Binary Sequence Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12881/) (2024)
- [TAT-R1: Terminology-Aware Translation with Reinforcement Learning and Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21172/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22931/) (2026)
- [GRC: Unifying Reasoning-Driven Generation, Retrieval and Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09100/) (2026)
- [CNeo-Bench: Diagnosing Large Language Models on Chinese Neologisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28053/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neologism-aware machine translation aims to translate source sentences containing neologisms into target languages. This field remains underexplored compared with general machine translation (MT). In this paper, we propose an agentic framework, NeoAMT, for neologism-aware machine translation equipped with a Wiktionary-based search toolkit. Specifically, we first construct a dedicated dataset for neologism-aware machine translation and build a search toolkit grounded in Wiktionary. The dataset covers 16 languages and 75 translation directions in total, derived from approximately 10 million records of an English Wiktionary dump. The retrieval corpus of the search toolkit is also constructed from around 3 million cleaned records of the same dump. We then leverage the dataset and toolkit to train a translation agent via reinforcement learning (RL) and to evaluate the accuracy of neologism-aware machine translation. Furthermore, we propose an RL training framework featuring a novel reward design and an adaptive rollout generation strategy that exploits translation difficulty to further improve the translation quality of translation agents using our search toolkit.
