# SAGE: Sustainable Agent-Guided Expert-tuning for Culturally Attuned Translation in Low-Resource Southeast Asia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19931 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19931/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 39 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 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 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00267/) (2023)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00043/) (2017)
- [Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10020/) (2022)
- [Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09848/) (2019)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [Tangled up in BLEU: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06264/) (2020)
- [CCAligned: A Massive Collection of Cross-Lingual Web-Document Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06154/) (2019)
- [Data Valuation using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11671/) (2019)
- [Data Collection and Quality Challenges in Deep Learning: A Data-Centric AI Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06409/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15115/) (2021)
- [Pretraining Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04799/) (2021)
- [Survey of Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00486/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [MERIT: Multilingual Expert-Reward Informed Tuning for Chinese-Centric Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04839/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Topological Graph Reasoning for Language-Guided Pulmonary Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05620/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The vision of an inclusive World Wide Web is impeded by a severe linguistic divide, particularly for communities in low-resource regions of Southeast Asia. While large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution for translation, their deployment in data-poor contexts faces a dual challenge: the scarcity of high-quality, culturally relevant data and the prohibitive energy costs of training on massive, noisy web corpora. To resolve the tension between digital inclusion and environmental sustainability, we introduce Sustainable Agent-Guided Expert-tuning (SAGE). This framework pioneers an energy-aware paradigm that prioritizes the "right data" over "big data". Instead of carbon-intensive training on unfiltered datasets, SAGE employs a reinforcement learning (RL) agent, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), to autonomously curate a compact training set. The agent utilizes a semantic reward signal derived from a small, expert-constructed set of community dialogues to filter out noise and cultural misalignment. We then efficiently fine-tune open-source LLMs on this curated data using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We applied SAGE to translation tasks between English and seven low-resource languages (LRLs) in Southeast Asia. Our approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance on BLEU-4 and COMET-22 metrics, effectively capturing local linguistic nuances. Crucially, SAGE surpasses baselines trained on full datasets while reducing data usage by 97.1% and training energy consumption by 95.2%. By delivering high-performance models with a minimal environmental footprint, SAGE offers a scalable and responsible pathway to bridge the digital divide in the Global South.