EDWARD-NMT: Elastic Dimensions With Adaptive Routing and Dual-consistency for Neural Machine Translation

arXiv:2610.32115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a powerful paradigm for scaling Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and managing language heterogeneity. However, practical limitations hinder its deployment on resource-constrained devices: the entire expert pool must remain in memory, and the per-token compute budget is statically fixed during training by rigid top-k routing. We introduce EDWARD-NMT (Elastic Dimensions With Adaptive Routing and Dual-consistency for NMT), a novel MoE encoder-decoder architecture designed for a train once, deploy anywhere paradigm that exposes a family of deployable sub-networks at inference time. EDWARD-NMT integrates three key innovations: (i) Matryoshka-style elastic dimensions to flexibly reduce the memory footprint; (ii) an adaptive sigmoid router with a learned, task-conditioned threshold, allowing each token to dynamically determine its active expert count; and (iii) a dual-consistency objective to maximize the performance of the extracted sub-networks. Extensive experiments on PhoMT (En-Vi), WMT-14 (En-De), multilingual OPUS-16, and a multi-domain De-En benchmark validate our approach. The full-capacity architecture matches or exceeds strong MoE baselines with improved parameter efficiency. Furthermore, the sub-networks seamlessly extracted from a single checkpoint consistently outperform comparably sized dense Transformers without any retraining.