Machine translation

Language barriers hinder global communication and access to worldwide knowledge. By improving machine translation systems, we hope to facilitate the exchange of culture and information.

Area 9. Machine Translation.svg

Publications

  • Scaling Ensemble Distribution Distillation to Many Classes with Proxy Targets

    Computer visionNatural language processing Distributional shiftUncertainty estimation OptimizationMachine translationSpeech processing
    Max Ryabinin
    Andrey Malinin
    Mark Gales
    NeurIPS, 2021

    Ensembles of machine learning models yield improved system performance as well as robust and interpretable uncertainty estimates; however, their inference costs can be prohibitively high. Ensemble Distribution Distillation (EnD^2) is an approach that allows a single model to efficiently capture both the predictive performance and uncertainty estimates of an ensemble. For classification, this is achieved by training a Dirichlet distribution over the ensemble members' output distributions via the maximum likelihood criterion. Although theoretically principled, this work shows that the criterion exhibits poor convergence when applied to large-scale tasks where the number of classes is very high. Specifically, we show that for the Dirichlet log-likelihood criterion classes with low probability induce larger gradients than high-probability classes. Hence during training the model focuses on the distribution of the ensemble tail-class probabilities rather than the probability of the correct and closely related classes. We propose a new training objective which minimizes the reverse KL-divergence to a Proxy-Dirichlet target derived from the ensemble. This loss resolves the gradient issues of EnD^2, as we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically on the ImageNet, LibriSpeech, and WMT17 En-De datasets containing 1000, 5000, and 40,000 classes, respectively.

  • Shifts: A Dataset of Real Distributional Shift Across Multiple Large-Scale Tasks

    Natural language processing Distributional shiftUncertainty estimation Machine translationTabular data
    Andrey Malinin
    Neil Band
    Yarin Gal
    Mark J. F. Gales
    Alexander Ganshin
    German Chesnokov
    Alexey Noskov
    Andrey Ploskonosov
    Liudmila Prokhorenkova
    Ivan Provilkov
    Vatsal Raina
    Vyas Raina
    Denis Roginskiy
    Mariya Shmatova
    Panos Tigas
    Boris Yangel
    NeurIPS Benchmarks, 2021

    Published at NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track.

    There has been significant research done on developing methods for improving robustness to distributional shift and uncertainty estimation. In contrast, only limited work has examined developing standard datasets and benchmarks for assessing these approaches. Additionally, most work on uncertainty estimation and robustness has developed new techniques based on small-scale regression or image classification tasks. However, many tasks of practical interest have different modalities, such as tabular data, audio, text, or sensor data, which offer significant challenges involving regression and discrete or continuous structured prediction. Thus, given the current state of the field, a standardized large-scale dataset of tasks across a range of modalities affected by distributional shifts is necessary. This will enable researchers to meaningfully evaluate the plethora of recently developed uncertainty quantification methods, as well as assessment criteria and state-of-the-art baselines. In this work, we propose the \emph{Shifts Dataset} for evaluation of uncertainty estimates and robustness to distributional shift. The dataset, which has been collected from industrial sources and services, is composed of three tasks, with each corresponding to a particular data modality: tabular weather prediction, machine translation, and self-driving car (SDC) vehicle motion prediction. All of these data modalities and tasks are affected by real, ‘in-the-wild’ distributional shifts and pose interesting challenges with respect to uncertainty estimation. In this work we provide a description of the dataset and baseline results for all tasks.

  • Multi-Sentence Resampling: A Simple Approach to Alleviate Dataset Length Bias and Beam-Search Degradation

    Natural language processing Machine translationSpeech processing
    Ivan Provilkov
    Andrey Malinin
    EMNLP, 2021

    Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is known to suffer from a beam-search problem: after a certain point, increasing beam size causes an overall drop in translation quality. This effect is especially pronounced for long sentences. While much work was done analyzing this phenomenon, primarily for autoregressive NMT models, there is still no consensus on its underlying cause. In this work, we analyze errors that cause major quality degradation with large beams in NMT and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We show that a factor that strongly contributes to the quality degradation with large beams is dataset length-bias - NMT datasets are strongly biased towards short sentences. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new data augmentation technique – Multi-Sentence Resampling (MSR). This technique extends the training examples by concatenating several sentences from the original dataset to make a long training example. We demonstrate that MSR significantly reduces degradation with growing beam size and improves final translation quality on the IWSTL15 En-Vi, IWSTL17 En-Fr, and WMT14 En-De datasets.

Datasets

  • Shifts Dataset

    Distributional shiftUncertainty estimation Tabular dataMachine translationNatural language processing
    Andrey Malinin
    Neil Band
    Yarin Gal
    Mark J. F. Gales
    Alexander Ganshin
    German Chesnokov
    Alexey Noskov
    Andrey Ploskonosov
    Liudmila Prokhorenkova
    Ivan Provilkov
    Vatsal Raina
    Vyas Raina
    Denis Roginskiy
    Mariya Shmatova
    Panos Tigas
    Boris Yangel

    The Shifts Dataset contains curated and labeled examples of real, 'in-the-wild' distributional shifts across three large-scale tasks. Specifically, it contains tabular weather prediction, machine translation, and vehicle motion prediction tasks' data used in Shifts Challenge 2021. Dataset shift is ubiquitous in all of these tasks and modalities.