Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive inference procedures that refine in token space often require computational overhead.
Approach: They propose an efficient inference procedure that iteratively refines translation purely in the continuous space using a latent variable instead of the latent variables.
Outcome: The proposed procedure is twice as efficient and more effective than the existing EM-like inference procedure.

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Fully Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models are slow to learn the dependency between output tokens.
Approach: They propose to use fully non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) to predict tokens with single forward of neural networks.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on three translation benchmarks with comparable performance to autoregressive and iterative NAT systems.
An Empirical Study of Iterative Refinements for Non-autoregressive Translation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in varied generation tasks, surpassing the autoregressive Transformer.
Approach: They propose a strategy to conduct efficient refinements without performance declines by using two simple metrics to identify potential problems existing in current refinement processes.
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Deterministic Non-Autoregressive Neural Sequence Modeling by Iterative Refinement (D18-1)

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Challenge: Despite its success, neural autoregressive modeling has its weakness in decoding, i.e., finding the most likely sequence.
Approach: They propose a conditional non-autoregressive neural sequence model based on iterative refinement based upon latent variable models and conditional denoising autoencoders.
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Learning to Rewrite for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translations have poor inference speed but weak recognition of erroneous translation pieces.
Approach: They propose an architecture to explicitly learn to rewrite the erroneous translation pieces.
Outcome: The proposed architecture can achieve better performance while significantly reducing decoding time.
Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: A Call for Clarity (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Non-autoregressive translation models require a single forward pass to generate the output sequence instead of iteratively producing each predicted token.
Approach: They propose to use a single forward pass to generate the output sequence instead of iteratively producing each predicted token.
Outcome: The proposed models improve translation quality and speed under third-party testing environments.
Hybrid-Regressive Paradigm for Accurate and Speed-Robust Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Autoregressive translation (NAT) is less robust in decoding batch size and hardware settings than NAT.
Approach: They propose a two-stage translation prototype that prompts a small number of AT predictions and fills in previously skipped tokens at once.
Outcome: The proposed translation prototype achieves comparable translation quality with AT while having 1.5x faster inference speed regardless of batch size and device.
Improving Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Data (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation is usually done via knowledge distillation from an autoregressive (AR) model.
Approach: They leverage large monolingual corpora to improve the NAR model's performance by transferring the autoregressive model' s generalization ability while preventing overfitting.
Outcome: The proposed methods on the WMT14 En-De and WMT16 En-Ro news translation tasks show that monolingual data augmentation improves the NAR model to approach the teacher AR model’s performance.
Align-Refine: Non-Autoregressive Speech Recognition via Iterative Realignment (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Non-autoregressive encoder-decoder models improve decoding speed, but generation quality suffers . editing at the level of output sequences limits model flexibility.
Approach: They propose *iterative realignment* which iteratively realigns connectionist temporal alignments.
Outcome: The proposed model matches an autoregressive baseline with a 14x speedup on the WSJ dataset; on LibriSpeech, it achieves an LM-free test-other WER of 9.0% (19% relative improvement on comparable work).
End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification (D18-1)

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Challenge: Autoregressive decoding is the only part of sequence-to-sequence models that prevents massive parallelization at inference time.
Approach: They propose a non-autoregressive architecture based on connectionist temporal classification . they conduct experiments on the WMT English-Romanian and English-German datasets .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves a significant speedup over autoregressive models . the model can be trained end-to-end and maintains translation quality comparable to other models compared to autoregression models based on connectionist temporal classification .
Enriching Non-Autoregressive Transformer with Syntactic and Semantic Structures for Neural Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive models have boosted the efficiency of neural machine translation, but their performance is significantly worse than that of autoregressive counterparts.
Approach: They propose to incorporate syntactic and semantic structures among natural languages into a non-autoregressive Transformer for the task of neural machine translation.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves faster speed and keeps translation quality compared with other models.

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