README.md

metadata

pretty_name: Instruction-Following Translation Bench
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
  - zh
  - en
  - ja
  - ko
  - ar
  - de
  - es
  - fil
  - fr
  - hi
  - id
  - it
  - ms
  - nl
  - pl
  - pt
  - ro
  - ru
  - sv
  - th
  - tr
  - vi
task_categories:
  - translation
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
tags:
  - evaluation
  - benchmark
  - instruction-following
  - constrained-translation
  - subtitle
  - terminology
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: test
        path: data/test.jsonl

Instruction-Following Translation Bench

Instruction-Following Translation Bench measures whether a translation system can obey explicit production constraints while translating. Real content pipelines rarely want a free translation: a subtitle line has to fit the time it is on screen, a glossary term has to come out exactly as the glossary says, a JSON payload has to come back with its keys intact, and a hashtag has to survive untranslated so it still links. A system that translates beautifully but breaks the structure around the text cannot be shipped.

The benchmark contains 3,000 evaluation instances across 10 constraint types, 10 content domains and 61 language pairs, built from Bilibili production content: subtitles, comments, on-screen comments, posts, novels, columns, books, web text and academic papers.

The benchmark is released as part of the Index-Translate model family and is referred to as InstTrans in the Index-Translate technical report. See Citation for how to refer to it.

Task and motivation

Each instance gives the model a source text plus a numbered list of constraints, and asks for a translation that satisfies all of them. Constraints are not suggestions: the scoring treats five of them as gates, so a single structural break zeroes the instance no matter how good the prose is.

The benchmark separates two things that are usually conflated:

• Instruction following — did the output keep the JSON keys, hit the glossary, preserve the hashtag, respect the syllable budget, keep the line breaks?
• Translation quality — is the translation itself accurate and fluent?

Both are reported. A system can score well on quality and badly on instruction following, and that gap is the thing this benchmark exists to expose.

Constraint types

Ten constraint types, split by how they are scored. Hard constraints are checked by deterministic rules and act as gates. Soft constraints are scored 0 / 0.5 / 1 by an LLM Judge and average into a multiplier.

Constraint	Type	Instances	What it requires
format_preserve	hard	2,098	Keep JSON / HTML / Markdown / placeholder structure intact
syllable_order	hard	601	Shorter on-screen durations get fewer syllables in the translation
term_compliance	hard	502	Render each glossary term exactly as specified
social_preserve	hard	316	Leave hashtags, @mentions and emote codes untranslated
layout_break	hard	266	Preserve line breaks, indentation and table alignment
style_consistency	soft	633	Hold the requested register (casual / neutral / formal)
term_cross_sentence	soft	508	Use one rendering of a term throughout the document
academic_format_preserve	soft	412	Leave LaTeX and citation markers untranslated
context_disambiguate	soft	42	Resolve a stated ambiguity the way the instruction says
coref_resolution	soft	24	Keep pronoun reference consistent with the stated antecedent

Instances carry 1–5 constraints each: 1,307 have one, 1,138 two, 426 three, 104 four, and 25 five. The 5,402 constraint annotations over 3,000 instances mean the average instance is scored on 1.8 constraints at once, which is where systems tend to fail — satisfying a glossary while also preserving JSON is harder than either alone.

The syllable constraint

syllable_order is the least obvious of the ten, and it is the one subtitle production actually needs. Each subtitle instance ships duration_s, the on-screen duration of every line. The requirement is not an absolute syllable count but the ordering: if line 6 is on screen longer than line 2, its translation should not be shorter in syllables.

Scoring is pairwise. For every pair of lines with different durations, the pair is an inversion if the duration ordering and the syllable-count ordering disagree. Concordance is 1 - inversions / comparable_pairs, and the constraint passes at concordance >= 0.9. Pairs with equal syllable counts are not inversions, and pairs with equal durations are not comparable. Syllable counting is language-specific (see eval/syllable.py) and handles numbers, acronyms and mixed scripts.

Dataset statistics

Item	Count
Evaluation instances	3,000
Constraint types	10
Constraint annotations	5,402
Language pairs	61
Target languages	22
Content domains	10

Domain	Value in domain	Instances
Bilibili posts	B站动态	320
Novels	小说	303
OGV subtitles	ogv字幕	302
On-screen comments	弹幕	302
Comments	评论	300
Columns	专栏文章	300
Academic papers	学术论文	299
UGC subtitles	UGC字幕	299
Books	书籍	293
Web text	网页文本	282

The dominant direction is Chinese into 21 other languages (2,419 instances), plus 313 English-source instances and 14–15 instances from each of 19 other source languages. zh is also the most common target (296 instances), from the English-source and other-source material.

Domains do not carry every constraint. On-screen comments, comments and posts only ever carry format_preserve, social_preserve and term_compliance; syllable_order appears only on subtitles, since only subtitles have durations; academic_format_preserve concentrates in papers. This is a property of the content, not a sampling gap — a hashtag constraint on an academic paper would be artificial.

Files and schema

README.md
manifest.json
LICENSE
requirements.txt
data/test.jsonl
prepare_inputs.py
evaluate.py
eval/
    __init__.py
    constraints.py
    prompts.py
    judge_client.py
    metrics.py
    syllable.py

manifest.json records release statistics, prompt versions, the redaction policy and the SHA-256 checksum of the data file.

Field	Type	Description
case_id	string	Unique instance identifier; use it to match predictions.
prompt	string	The complete instruction sent to the model, including source text and constraints.
reference	string	Reference translation satisfying the constraints. Used by the quality Judge, never sent to the model.
source_lang	string	Source language code.
target_lang	string	Target language code.
source_text	string	Source text alone, extracted from prompt. Convenience field for rule checking.
constraints	list of strings	The numbered constraint lines, verbatim from prompt. Aligned 1:1 with constraint_ids.
constraint_ids	list of strings	Machine-readable constraint types for this instance.
scenario	string	Coarse content grouping (7 values).
domain	string	Fine content grouping (10 values); several domains share one scenario.
duration_s	list of floats	Per-line on-screen duration in seconds. Present on the 601 subtitle instances with syllable_order.
batch_size	integer	Number of sentences in a multi-sentence instance. Present when applicable.
style	object	Requested register, e.g. {"formality": "casual"}. Present when the instance specifies one.

prompt is the single source of truth for what the model sees. source_text and constraints are derived from it with the same extraction the scorer uses, so they cannot drift apart.

Source text retains its original informal spelling, punctuation, emote codes and @mentions; the social_preserve constraint depends on those surviving translation, so they are not masked. Provenance identifiers (video and post IDs, internal file paths) and authorship fields were removed from the release; manifest.json records exactly which.

Contact details that can reach a person or a group chat — phone numbers, email addresses, QQ group numbers and WeChat IDs, mostly appearing in promotional spam inside user-generated text — are replaced by bare uppercase tokens (PHONE_REDACTED, EMAIL_REDACTED, QQ_GROUP_REDACTED, WECHAT_ID_REDACTED) in prompt, reference and source_text. This touches 15 of the 3,000 instances. No constraint scores contact details, and the masks were chosen to contain no regex-special characters so they cannot be mistaken for an HTML tag, a placeholder or a Markdown link by the format checkers; scoring the references gives the same IF_Score before and after masking, with zero per-constraint verdict changes. URLs and @mentions are kept, since format_preserve and social_preserve score them.

Loading the data

pip install -r requirements.txt

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "IndexTeam/InstTrans-Bench", split="test"
)
print(len(dataset))            # 3000
print(dataset[0]["prompt"])
print(dataset[0]["constraint_ids"])

Generating translations

Export the standard model inputs from the repository root:

python prepare_inputs.py --output outputs/model_inputs.jsonl

Each output row contains only case_id and a chat-format messages list. Send only messages to the model; use case_id locally to associate the returned translation with the instance. Do not send the complete dataset row, since it contains the reference translation.

Use any inference engine, then save one translation per instance as JSONL:

import json

with open("outputs/model_inputs.jsonl", encoding="utf-8") as handle:
    inputs = [json.loads(line) for line in handle]

translations = [...]  # one string per input, aligned with the rows above
assert len(translations) == len(inputs)
with open("outputs/predictions.jsonl", "w", encoding="utf-8") as handle:
    for row, translation in zip(inputs, translations):
        handle.write(json.dumps({
            "case_id": row["case_id"],
            "prediction": translation,
        }, ensure_ascii=False) + "\n")

Predictions should be final translations without reasoning traces or commentary. Many instances require the output to be a JSON object with the source's keys, so any wrapper text around it will fail format_preserve on its own. Record the model revision, inference engine, decoding parameters and reasoning setting with reported results.

Evaluation protocol

Scoring has two independent dimensions.

IF_Score is the headline metric, on a 0–1 scale:

IF_Score = product(hard_constraint_passed) x mean(soft_constraint_scores)

Every hard constraint is a gate: one failure sets the product to 0 and the instance scores 0 regardless of the soft scores. Soft constraints are scored 0 / 0.5 / 1 by the Judge and averaged. An instance with no soft constraints uses a multiplier of 1.0, so it scores either 1.0 or 0.0.

Translation quality is scored separately by an LLM Judge that sees the source, the reference and the candidate, and is told to ignore format and constraints entirely. It is reported alongside IF_Score, not folded into it.

Score	Quality interpretation
1	Accurate and natural; no serious errors, minimal minor ones.
0.5	Minor errors only, or few serious ones (under 10% of sentences); readable overall.
0	Many serious errors (over 10% of sentences); quality badly affected.

Hard constraints are checked by deterministic rules in eval/constraints.py, so that part of the score is reproducible without a Judge at all:

python evaluate.py \
  --predictions outputs/predictions.jsonl \
  --output-dir outputs/evaluation \
  --skip-judge

The full run needs a Judge. The default is gpt-5.6-sol. Configure an endpoint and credentials for a provider you have access to; none are bundled.

export JUDGE_API_BASE="https://YOUR_PROVIDER/v1"
export JUDGE_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"

python evaluate.py \
  --predictions outputs/predictions.jsonl \
  --output-dir outputs/evaluation \
  --judge-model gpt-5.6-sol

The client picks a request shape from the model name. A reasoning model (gpt-5*, gpt-6*, o1/o3/o4) goes to /responses with a 4,096-token output budget and reasoning effort none; every other model goes to /chat/completions at temperature 0 with a 2,048-token limit. Reasoning is disabled so the Judge scores rather than deliberates, and the response cache keys on the endpoint and its parameters, so switching Judge models never serves a verdict produced under a different configuration.

If your provider serves a reasoning model on /chat/completions instead, pass a model name outside those prefixes, or adjust uses_responses_endpoint in eval/judge_client.py.

The evaluator writes per-instance scores (scores.jsonl), aggregate metrics (summary.json) and a reusable response cache. The summary breaks results down by constraint, scenario, domain and language pair, and reports per-constraint pass rates so a low IF_Score can be traced to the constraint causing it. Missing or empty predictions score 0 and stay in the denominator. Duplicate or unknown case_ids are rejected. Provider failures and invalid or incomplete Judge scores abort the run rather than silently becoming quality scores. This public release validates the exact 0/0.5/1 verdict, including the soft-constraint entries; malformed verdicts are not excluded from the denominator or treated as a passed instruction.

--limit N scores the first N instances as a smoke check and marks the summary as non-formal. Subset and --skip-judge scores are not full-benchmark results.

Scores obtained with a different Judge model, provider or decoding configuration are not comparable. Report the Judge configuration alongside any new numbers.

Links

• Technical report: Index-Translate Technical Report

Citation

If you use this benchmark, please cite the Index-Translate technical report:

@techreport{indextranslate2026,
  author={Tianjiao Li and Mengran Yu and Chenyu Shi and Lusheng Zhang and
          Qisi Chen and Yanshan Zhou and Ji Qi and Jingying Liu and
          Yuang Feng and Ziang Cui and Tianxing Yan},
  title={Index-Translate: A Multilingual Translation Model Family --- Text, Speech, Controlled Dubbing, and Long-Document Translation},
  institution={Index LLM Team},
  year={2026},
  month={September},
  eprint={2609.40181},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40181}
}

License

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. You may share and adapt the dataset for non-commercial purposes with appropriate attribution. See LICENSE and the full license text.

Benchmark collection

Part of the Index-Translate Benchmarks collection.