Transformers have become an indispensable module for text generation models since their great success in machine translation. Previous works attribute the~success of transformers to the query-key-value dot-product attention, which provides a robust inductive bias by the fully connected token graphs. However, we found that self-attention has a severe limitation. When predicting the (i+1)-th token, self-attention only takes the i-th token as an information collector, and it tends to give a high attention weight to those tokens similar to itself. Therefore, most of the historical information that occurred before the i-th token is not taken into consideration. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a new architecture, called bird-eye transformer(BET), which goes one step further to improve the performance of transformers by reweighting self-attention to encourage it to focus more on important historical information. We have conducted experiments on multiple text generation tasks, including machine translation (2 datasets) and language models (3 datasets). These experimental~results show that our proposed model achieves a better performance than the baseline transformer architectures on~all~datasets. The code is released at: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/bet-transformer/home}.

Recently, a new training oaxe loss has proven effective to ameliorate the effect of multimodality for non-autoregressive translation (NAT), which removes the penalty of word order errors in the standard cross-entropy loss. Starting from the intuition that reordering generally occurs between phrases, we extend oaxe by only allowing reordering between ngram phrases and still requiring a strict match of word order within the phrases. Extensive experiments on NAT benchmarks across language pairs and data scales demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our approach. %Further analyses show that the proposed ngram-oaxe alleviates the multimodality problem with a better modeling of phrase translation. Further analyses show that ngram-oaxe indeed improves the translation of ngram phrases, and produces more fluent translation with a better modeling of sentence structure.

Word alignment which aims to extract lexicon translation equivalents between source and target sentences, serves as a fundamental tool for natural language processing. Recent studies in this area have yielded substantial improvements by generating alignments from contextualized embeddings of the pre-trained multilingual language models. However, we find that the existing approaches capture few interactions between the input sentence pairs, which degrades the word alignment quality severely, especially for the ambiguous words in the monolingual context. To remedy this problem, we propose Cross-Align to model deep interactions between the input sentence pairs, in which the source and target sentences are encoded separately with the shared self-attention modules in the shallow layers, while cross-lingual interactions are explicitly constructed by the cross-attention modules in the upper layers. Besides, to train our model effectively, we propose a two-stage training framework, where the model is trained with a simple Translation Language Modeling (TLM) objective in the first stage and then finetuned with a self-supervised alignment objective in the second stage. Experiments show that the proposed Cross-Align achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four out of five language pairs.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models are typically trained with the cross-entropy loss, which forces the model outputs to be aligned verbatim with the target sentence and will highly penalize small shifts in word positions. Latent alignment models relax the explicit alignment by marginalizing out all monotonic latent alignments with the CTC loss. However, they cannot handle non-monotonic alignments, which is non-negligible as there is typically global word reordering in machine translation. In this work, we explore non-monotonic latent alignments for NAT. We extend the alignment space to non-monotonic alignments to allow for the global word reordering and further consider all alignments that overlap with the target sentence. We non-monotonically match the alignments to the target sentence and train the latent alignment model to maximize the F1 score of non-monotonic matching. Extensive experiments on major WMT benchmarks show that our method substantially improves the translation performance of CTC-based models. Our best model achieves 30.06 BLEU on WMT14 En-De with only one-iteration decoding, closing the gap between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems have received much recent attention due to their human-level accuracy. While existing works mostly focus on either improving accuracy or testing accuracy robustness, the computation efficiency of NMT systems, which is of paramount importance due to often vast translation demands and real-time requirements, has surprisingly received little attention. In this paper, we make the first attempt to understand and test potential computation efficiency robustness in state-of-the-art NMT systems. By analyzing the working mechanism and implementation of 1455 public-accessible NMT systems, we observe a fundamental property in NMT systems that could be manipulated in an adversarial manner to reduce computation efficiency significantly. Our key motivation is to generate test inputs that could sufficiently delay the generation of EOS such that NMT systems would have to go through enough iterations to satisfy the pre-configured threshold. We present NMTSloth, which develops a gradient-guided technique that searches for a minimal and unnoticeable perturbation at character-level, token-level, and structure-level, which sufficiently delays the appearance of EOS and forces these inputs to reach the naturally-unreachable threshold. To demonstrate the effectiveness of NMTSloth, we conduct a systematic evaluation on three public-available NMT systems: Google T5, AllenAI WMT14, and Helsinki-NLP translators. Experimental results show that NMTSloth can increase NMT systems' response latency and energy consumption by 85% to 3153% and 86% to 3052%, respectively, by perturbing just one character or token in the input sentence. Our case study shows that inputs generated by NMTSloth significantly affect the battery power in real-world mobile devices (i.e., drain more than 30 times battery power than normal inputs).

The rapid development of single-modal pre-training has prompted researchers to pay more attention to cross-modal pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model, SpeechUT, to connect the representations of a speech encoder and a text decoder with a shared unit encoder. Leveraging hidden-unit as an interface to align speech and text, we can decompose the speech-to-text model into a speech-to-unit model and a unit-to-text model, which can be jointly pre-trained with unpaired speech and text data respectively. Our proposed SpeechUT is fine-tuned and evaluated on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) tasks. Experimental results show that SpeechUT gets substantial improvements over strong baselines, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. To better understand the proposed SpeechUT, detailed analyses are conducted. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://aka.ms/SpeechUT.

End-to-end text image translation (TIT), which aims at translating the source language embedded in images to the target language, has attracted intensive attention in recent research. However, data sparsity limits the performance of end-to-end text image translation. Multi-task learning is a non-trivial way to alleviate this problem via exploring knowledge from complementary related tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel text translation enhanced text image translation, which trains the end-to-end model with text translation as an auxiliary task. By sharing model parameters and multi-task training, our model is able to take full advantage of easily-available large-scale text parallel corpus. Extensive experimental results show our proposed method outperforms existing end-to-end methods, and the joint multi-task learning with both text translation and recognition tasks achieves better results, proving translation and recognition auxiliary tasks are complementary.

We evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models in multilingual settings. We introduce the Multilingual Grade School Math (MGSM) benchmark, by manually translating 250 grade-school math problems from the GSM8K dataset (Cobbe et al., 2021) into ten typologically diverse languages. We find that the ability to solve MGSM problems via chain-of-thought prompting emerges with increasing model scale, and that models have strikingly strong multilingual reasoning abilities, even in underrepresented languages such as Bengali and Swahili. Finally, we show that the multilingual reasoning abilities of language models extend to other tasks such as commonsense reasoning and word-in-context semantic judgment. The MGSM benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.

Identifying semantically equivalent sentences is important for many cross-lingual and mono-lingual NLP tasks. Current approaches to semantic equivalence take a loose, sentence-level approach to "equivalence," despite previous evidence that fine-grained differences and implicit content have an effect on human understanding (Roth and Anthonio, 2021) and system performance (Briakou and Carpuat, 2021). In this work, we introduce a novel, more sensitive method of characterizing semantic equivalence that leverages Abstract Meaning Representation graph structures. We develop an approach, which can be used with either gold or automatic AMR annotations, and demonstrate that our solution is in fact finer-grained than existing corpus filtering methods and more accurate at predicting strictly equivalent sentences than existing semantic similarity metrics. We suggest that our finer-grained measure of semantic equivalence could limit the workload in the task of human post-edited machine translation and in human evaluation of sentence similarity.

Applying Reinforcement learning (RL) following maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) pre-training is a versatile method for enhancing neural machine translation (NMT) performance. However, recent work has argued that the gains produced by RL for NMT are mostly due to promoting tokens that have already received a fairly high probability in pre-training. We hypothesize that the large action space is a main obstacle to RL's effectiveness in MT, and conduct two sets of experiments that lend support to our hypothesis. First, we find that reducing the size of the vocabulary improves RL's effectiveness. Second, we find that effectively reducing the dimension of the action space without changing the vocabulary also yields notable improvement as evaluated by BLEU, semantic similarity, and human evaluation. Indeed, by initializing the network's final fully connected layer (that maps the network's internal dimension to the vocabulary dimension), with a layer that generalizes over similar actions, we obtain a substantial improvement in RL performance: 1.5 BLEU points on average.