Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) models suffer from their inherent multi-modality problem.
Approach: They propose an Adversarial Non-autoregressive Transformer for Image Captioning that improves model performance by modifying model structure to be compatible with contrastive learning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 26.72 times faster than the autoregressive model on the MSCOCO dataset.

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Challenge: Existing non-AutoRegressive (NAR) text generation models lack proper pre-training, making them far behind pre-trained autoregressive models.
Approach: They propose a novel pre-training task to promote prediction consistency in non-autoregressive (NAR) generation.
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Exploring Non-Autoregressive Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text style transfer use autoregressive decoding, but they are slow and low parallelizability.
Approach: They propose a base NAR model by directly adapting the common training scheme from its AutoRegressive counterpart.
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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.
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O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for video captioning consider a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects.
Approach: They propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach to video captioning . it performs three steps: 1) identify the focused objects and predict their locations . 2) generate related attribute words and relation words of these focused objects to form a draft caption .
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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.
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NAG-NER: a Unified Non-Autoregressive Generation Framework for Various NER Tasks (2023.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing models for general NER tasks require entities to be generated in a predefined order, causing error propagation and inefficient decoding.
Approach: They propose a non-autoregressive generation framework for general NER tasks that generates entities as a set instead of a sequence, avoiding error propagation and inefficient decoding.
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Image Captioning with Very Scarce Supervised Data: Adversarial Semi-Supervised Learning Approach (D19-1)

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Challenge: Recent work on image captioning has made impressive progress . however, the results are limited and the model is difficult to train .
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised framework for training an image captioning model by assigning pseudo-labels to unpaired samples via Generative Adversarial Networks.
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Non-Autoregressive Text Generation with Pre-trained Language Models (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Autoregressive generation models generate tokens in a left-to-right, token-by-token fashion, resulting in lag in inference.
Approach: They propose to use BERT as the backbone of a non-autoregressive generation model for greatly improved performance.
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Reinforcement Learning for Edit-Based Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2024.naacl-srw)

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Challenge: Non-autoregressive (NAR) language models have a performance gap due to the large decoding space and difficulty in capturing dependency between target words accurately.
Approach: They propose to use reinforcement learning to enhance the performance of edit-based NAR models by using stepwise reward maximization and episodic reward maximisation.
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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.
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