Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation: It’s Not as Fast as it Seems (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Efficient machine translation models are commercially important as they can increase inference speeds, reduce costs and carbon emissions. |
| Approach: | They compare NAR models with autoregressive models to evaluate their performance . they point out flaws in evaluation methodology and argue for consistent evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is faster on GPUs, but slower under more realistic usage conditions. |
Similar Papers
Improving Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Data (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
An Empirical Study of Iterative Refinements for Non-autoregressive Translation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the autoregressive Transformer by around one BLEU on average. |
Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: A Call for Clarity (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
A Study of Non-autoregressive Model for Sequence Generation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive (NAR) models generate all tokens in parallel, resulting in faster generation speed compared to autoregressive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation and source-target alignment to bridge the gap between NAR and autoregressive models in various tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques can speed up NAR models in some tasks but not all . the proposed techniques reduce target token dependency while allowing for faster inference . |
What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation? (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that non-autoregressive (NAT) methods underperform autoregressive methods (AT) however, their evaluation using BLEU has been shown to weakly correlate with human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate four representative NAT methods using BLEU to narrow the performance gap between autoregressive and autoregressive translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods underperform NAT and autoregressive methods under more reliable evaluation metrics. |
End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models require text supervision during training, which is not feasible for numerous unwritten languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) model that generates discrete units from the source speech and employs a unit-based vocoder to synthesize the target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves translation quality comparable to the autoregressive model while preserving up to 26.81 decoding speedup. |
Fully Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Helping the Weak Makes You Strong: Simple Multi-Task Learning Improves Non-Autoregressive Translators (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive (NAR) neural machine translation models require a conditional independence assumption on target sequences, resulting in less informative learning signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic multi-task learning framework to provide more informative learning signals for NAR models under conventional MLE training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy of multiple NAR baselines without additional decoding overhead. |
Non-Autoregressive Models for Fast Sequence Generation (2022.emnlp-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models can only generate target sequence word-by-word due to the AR mechanism and suffer from slow inference. |
| Approach: | This tutorial provides an introduction to non-autoregressive sequence generation. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial explains how to generate non-autoregressive sequence generation models. |