Wen Lai (赖文)

I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Alexander Fraser at Technical University of Munich (TUM). Previously, I was a PhD student in School of Computation, Information and Technology at Technical University of Munich (TUM) under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Fraser and mentored by Prof. Ivan Titov. I was also affiliated with and supported by the Munich Center for Machine Learning. I initially start my PhD in Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) from April 2021 to March 2024 and later transferred to TUM along with my supervisor.

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Research Interests

Machine Translation: Low-resource MT, Domain Adaptation, Multilingual MT, Large Language Models for MT
Machine Learning: Meta-Learning, Transfer Learning, Contrastive Learning
Multilingual Resource Construction: Datasets for Continued Pretraining, Post-Training, Factual Evaluation
Multimodal: Large Vision-Language Models

News

12/2025, I started a postdoc position in Prof. Alexander Fraser’s group at TU Munich (TUM).

11/2025, I successfully passed my PhD defense. I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Prof. Alex Fraser, and all committee members, including Prof. Rico Sennrich, Prof. Ivan Vulić, and Prof. Chunyang Chen, for their valuable feedback and support. The presentation slides are slides.

09/2025, Excited to share that DCAD-2000 has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.

08/2025, One paper to EMNLP 2025. Please Check From Unaligned to Aligned: Scaling Multilingual LLMs with Multi-Way Parallel Corpora.

05/2025, One paper in Arxiv: From Unaligned to Aligned: Scaling Multilingual LLMs with Multi-Way Parallel Corpora.

05/2025, One paper accepted to ICML 2025.

02/2025, one paper in ArXiv: DCAD-2000: A Multilingual Dataset across 2000+ Languages with Data Cleaning as Anomaly Detection.

02/2025, one paper in ArXiv: Joint Localization and Activation Editing for Low-Resource Fine-Tuning.

10/2024, I am visiting the NLP Group at University of Edingburg from Octorber 2024.

09/2024, One paper accepted to EMNLP 2024.

05/2024, One paper accepted to ACL 2024.

04/2024, I will be working at Technical University of Munich (TUM) as a PhD Student from April 2024.

11/2023, One paper in Arxiv titled Extending Multilingual Machine Translation through Imitation Learning.

10/2023, One paper accepted to EMNLP2023.

07/2023, I will be working at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence as a research intern from September 2023.

05/2023, One paper in Arxiv titled "Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation ".

03/2023, I gave a presentation at the Helsinki NLP Group called "Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation in Few-Shot Setting". Check out the video and the slides.

02/2023, Invited to serve as reviewer for LoResMT 2023.

11/2022, Invited to serve as reviewer for EACL 2023.

10/2022, One paper accepted to EMNLP2022.

08/2022, One paper accepted to COLING2022.

06/2022, Invited to serve as reviewer/PC member for LoResMT2022 and WMT2022.

12/2021, One paper in Arxiv.

10/2021, One paper in WMT2021.

04/2021, Join CIS Group at LMU Munich under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Fraser.

10/2020, Start to remote visit in Alex's Group.

05/2020, Defended my Master Thesis "Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages".

Publications

Adaptation to Data Sparsity in Machine Translation and Large Language Models

PhD Dissertation; Technical University of Munich (TUM) | paper | slides
Committee: Prof. Alexander Fraser, Prof. Rico Sennrich, Prof. Ivan Vulić and Prof. Chunyang Chen.

From Unaligned to Aligned: Scaling Multilingual LLMs with Multi-Way Parallel Corpora
Yingli Shen*, Wen Lai*, Shuo Wang, Kangyang Luo, Alexander Fraser and Maosong Sun
EMNLP 2025 | paper | code | dataset | | poster | slides (* Equal contribution)
Nominated for Outstanding Paper Award and Resource Award

DCAD-2000: A Multilingual Dataset across 2000+ Languages with Data Cleaning as Anomaly Detection
Yingli Shen*, Wen Lai*, Shuo Wang, Xueren Zhang, Kangyang Luo, Alexander Fraser and Maosong Sun
NeurIPS 2025 | paper | code | dataset | poster | slides (* Equal contribution)

Style-Specific Neurons for Steering LLMs in Text Style Transfer
Wen Lai, Viktor Hangya, Alexander Fraser
EMNLP 2024 | paper | code | poster | slides

LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback
Wen Lai, Mohsen Mesgar, Alexander Fraser
ACL 2024 | paper | code | poster | slides

Extending Multilingual Machine Translation through Imitation Learning
Wen Lai, Viktor Hangya, Yingli Shen, Alexander Fraser
ArXiv:2311.08538 | paper

Mitigating Data Imbalance and Representation Degeneration in Multilingual Machine Translation
Wen Lai, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Alexander Fraser
EMNLP 2023 | paper | code | poster | slides

The LMU Munich System for the WMT 2021 Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation Shared Task
Wen Lai, Jindřich Libovický, Alexander Fraser
WMT 2021 | paper | poster

Honors and Awards

06/2021, Facebook Compute Grant, Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation Shared Tasks

06/2020, Outstanding Master Thesis paper at Minzu University of China

08/2018, CWMT2018: Uyghur-Chinese Track (2nd), Tibetan-Chinese Track (3rd)

Selected Students

Marko Bierlich: Analyzing the Anisotropy Phenomenon in Multilingual Machine Translation Models. (LMU Munich, Bachelor Thesis, 09/2022-12/2022)

Bartłomiej Jezierski: Transliteration-Aided Machine Translation for Related Low-Resource Languages: Upper and Lower Sorbian. (Technical University of Munich, Guided Research, 04/2022-12/2022)

Services

ACL Rolling Reviewer

NAACL 2025

EMNLP 2023

EACL 2023

WMT 2023, 2022

LoresMT 2023, 2022

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