The provided code defines a Pandas UDF of type Series-to-Series, where a new instance of the language model is created on each call, which happens per batch. This is inefficient and results in significant overhead due to repeated model initialization.

To reduce the frequency of model loading, the engineer should convert the UDF to an iterator-based Pandas UDF (Iterator[pd.Series] -> Iterator[pd.Series]). This allows the model to be loaded once per executor and reused across multiple batches, rather than once per call.

From the official Databricks documentation:

“Iterator of Series to Iterator of Series UDFs are useful when the UDF initialization is expensive… For example, loading a ML model once per executor rather than once per row/batch.”

— Databricks Official Docs: Pandas UDFs

Correct implementation looks like:

python

CopyEdit

@pandas_udf("string")

def translate_udf(batch_iter: Iterator[pd.Series]) -> Iterator[pd.Series]:

model = get_translation_model(target_lang='es')

for batch in batch_iter:

yield batch.apply(model)

This refactor ensures the get_translation_model() is invoked once per executor process, not per batch, significantly improving pipeline performance.