docs/NEWS_PUSH.md

News mid-parity push — measured

Built: 2026-07-22T17:10:39.514108+00:00
Law pin: D1D38A

Headline

System	sacreBLEU	Gap to 40
Base opus-mt-de-en	33.88	6.12
NLLB-600M	33.37	6.63
Product cross-NLL ensemble	34.11	5.89
FT v3 (early-stop) test	33.41	6.59
FT v3 best val	35.76	(not test)
Oracle uF1 ensemble	37.13	2.87

Mid-40 cleared? No.

Finetune v3

• Froze first 3/6 encoder layers, lr=3e-5, train=120k pairs
• Early-stop patience 4 @ every 500 steps
• Best val 35.76 @ step 500; test 33.41 (do not ship over base)
• Saved: Helsinki-NLP__opus-mt-de-en-wmt-ft-v3

Product ensemble

Cross-model NLL pick: 34.11 (opus 1776 / nllb 1227).
Same as MBR-cross-NLL. Oracle still 37.13 (~3 pts selection headroom).

Chat (prior lever)

Neural-first hybrid: 48.74 sacre — past mid bar 45.

Honest remaining path to beat news mid-bar

1. Learned ensemble / quality estimator (close 34.1 → ~37)
2. Larger student (NLLB-1.3B) or multi-epoch FT with true WMT val that tracks test
3. FLORES multi-pair when unlocked

Repos

Code + this report shipped to GitHub / HF / Kaggle with verify pack.