@inproceedings{abubacar-etal-2026-parameter,
    title = "Parameter-Efficient Quality Estimation via Frozen Recursive Models",
    author = "Abubacar, Umar  and
      Bauer, Roman  and
      Kanojia, Diptesh",
    editor = "Hettiarachchi, Hansi  and
      Ranasinghe, Tharindu  and
      Plum, Alistair  and
      Rayson, Paul  and
      Mitkov, Ruslan  and
      Gaber, Mohamed  and
      Premasiri, Damith  and
      Tan, Fiona Anting  and
      Uyangodage, Lasitha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Models for Low-Resource Languages ({L}o{R}es{LM} 2026)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/manual-author-scripts/2026.loreslm-1.52/",
    pages = "609--614",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-377-7",
    abstract = "Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) achieve strong results on reasoning tasks through iterative refinement of a shared network. We investigate whether these recursive mechanisms transfer to Quality Estimation (QE) for low-resource languages using a three-phase methodology. Experiments on 8 language pairs on a low-resource QE dataset reveal three findings. First, TRM{'}s recursive mechanisms do not transfer to QE. External iteration hurts performance, and internal recursion offers only narrow benefits. Next, representation quality dominates architectural choices, and lastly, frozen pretrained embeddings match fine-tuned performance while reducing trainable parameters by 37$\times$ (7M vs 262M). TRM-QE with frozen XLM-R embeddings achieves a Spearman{'}s correlation of 0.370, matching fine-tuned variants (0.369) and outperforming an equivalent-depth standard transformer (0.336). On Hindi and Tamil, frozen TRM-QE outperforms MonoTransQuest (560M parameters) with 80$\times$ fewer trainable parameters, suggesting that weight sharing combined with frozen embeddings enables parameter efficiency for QE."
}