Research

NLP

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

October 18, 2020

Abstract

Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model here.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Angela Fan

Shruti Bhosale

Holger Schwenk

Zhiyi Ma

Ahmed El-Kishky

Siddharth Goyal

Mandeep Baines

Onur Celebi

Guillaume Wenzek

Vishrav Chaudhary

Naman Goyal

Tom Birch

Vitaliy Liptchinsky

Sergey Edunov

Edouard Grave

Michael Auli

Armand Joulin

Publisher

arXiv

Related Publications

June 05, 2026

Conversational AI

Ranking & Recommendations

Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Agentic Retrieval

Zeyu Yang, Qi Ma, Jason Chen, Anshumali Shrivastava

June 05, 2026

May 19, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data

Dongyan Lin, Phillip Rust, Angel Villar Corrales, Alvin W. M. Tan, Mahi Luthra, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Vanessa Stark, Surya Parimi, Jiayi Shen, Youssef Benchekroun, Yosuke Higuchi, Martin Gleize, Tom Fizycki, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Juan Pino, Michael C. Frank, Emmanuel Dupoux

May 19, 2026

May 17, 2026

Conversational AI

GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains

Rohit Patel, Alexandre Rezende, Steven McClain

May 17, 2026

May 12, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Jean Remi King, Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Sophia Houhamdi, Jarod Levy, Josephine Raugel, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Teon Brooks, Katelyn Begany, Yohann Benchetrit, Marlene Careil, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy Rapin

May 12, 2026

October 31, 2019

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

October 31, 2019

March 14, 2019

NLP

On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research

Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin

March 14, 2019

January 13, 2020

NLP

Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research

Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert

January 13, 2020

April 30, 2018

NLP

Computer Vision

Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research

Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston

April 30, 2018

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.