Confident but Wrong: A Constrained Decoding Diagnostic for Low-Resource Automatic Post-Editing

Abstract

Automatic Post-Editing (APE) for low-resource languages (LRLs) often fails to improve Machine Translation (MT), and the score alone cannot say why: whether more training would help, or whether the training data is too inconsistent to learn from. We introduce a black-box, inference-time diagnostic that tells these two cases apart without retraining or annotation. It varies an edit-distance penalty $λ$ that drives the model from free editing towards copying the MT, and reads two signals: (1) the shape of the Translation Edit Rate (TER)-vs-$λ$ curve, U-shaped if edits from the model reduce error and monotonically decreasing if none does; and (2) the ordering of constraint variants that trust model confidence to increasing degrees, which shows whether confidence tracks edit quality. Across decoder-only and encoder-decoder models on English-Sinhala, the diagnostic exposes two failure modes consistent with a heterogeneous post-edit signal as the underlying cause: Binary Collapse, where the model copies the MT or makes off-target edits, and Confident Miscalibration, where the confidence signals we test do not separate useful edits from unnecessary ones. The pattern holds on English-Marathi and English-Tamil, with the failure modes tracking the post-edit distribution rather than MT quality or language family. Beyond diagnosis, the curve shape prescribes a concrete next step for practitioners; in the favorable case, a static constraint yields a free inference-time accuracy gain. We release the first English-Sinhala (~66k) and a new English-Tamil (~39k) APE datasets with all code.