非自动性变压器（NAT）是文本生成模型的家族，旨在通过并行预测整个句子来减少解码延迟。但是，这种延迟减少牺牲了捕获从左到右的依赖性的能力，从而使NAT学习非常具有挑战性。在本文中，我们介绍了理论和经验分析，以揭示NAT学习的挑战，并提出统一的观点来了解现有的成功。首先，我们表明，简单地通过最大化可能性来训练NAT可以导致边际分布的近似值，但在代币之间降低了所有依赖关系，在该数据集的条件总相关性可以测量删除的信息。其次，我们在统一的框架中正式化了许多以前的目标，并表明他们的成功可以得出结论，以最大程度地提高代理分布的可能性，从而减少了信息损失。实证研究表明，我们的观点可以解释NAT学习中的现象，并指导新培训方法的设计。

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) models suffer from the multi-modality problem that there may exist multiple possible translations of a source sentence, so the reference sentence may be inappropriate for the training when the NAT output is closer to other translations. In response to this problem, we introduce a rephraser to provide a better training target for NAT by rephrasing the reference sentence according to the NAT output. As we train NAT based on the rephraser output rather than the reference sentence, the rephraser output should fit well with the NAT output and not deviate too far from the reference, which can be quantified as reward functions and optimized by reinforcement learning. Experiments on major WMT benchmarks and NAT baselines show that our approach consistently improves the translation quality of NAT. Specifically, our best variant achieves comparable performance to the autoregressive Transformer, while being 14.7 times more efficient in inference.

自回归（AR）和非自动增加（NAR）模型对性能和延迟具有自己的优势，将它们与一个模型相结合，可能会利用两者。目前的组合框架更多地关注多个解码范例的集成，具有统一的生成模型，例如，屏蔽语言模型。然而，由于训练目标和推理之间的差距，概括可能对性能有害。在本文中，我们的目标是通过在统一框架下保留AR和NAR的原始目标来缩小差距。具体地，我们通过将AR和NAR共同建模（左右，左右和直）与新引入的方向变量来提出定向变压器（Diformer），这通过控制每个的预测令牌在那方面有特定的依赖关系。通过方向实现的统一成功地保留了AR和NAR中使用的原始依赖性假设，保留了泛化和性能。 4 WMT基准测试的实验表明，Diformer优于当前的联合建模工作，适用于AR和NAR解码的1.5个以上的BLEU积分，也对最先进的独立AR和NAR模型具有竞争力。

For sequence generation, both autoregressive models and non-autoregressive models have been developed in recent years. Autoregressive models can achieve high generation quality, but the sequential decoding scheme causes slow decoding speed. Non-autoregressive models accelerate the inference speed with parallel decoding, while their generation quality still needs to be improved due to the difficulty of modeling multi-modalities in data. To address the multi-modality issue, we propose Diff-Glat, a non-autoregressive model featured with a modality diffusion process and residual glancing training. The modality diffusion process decomposes the modalities and reduces the modalities to learn for each transition. And the residual glancing sampling further smooths the modality learning procedures. Experiments demonstrate that, without using knowledge distillation data, Diff-Glat can achieve superior performance in both decoding efficiency and accuracy compared with the autoregressive Transformer.

最近，非自动增加（NAT）模型并行地预测输出，与自回归（AT）模型相比，实现了产生速度的大量改进。在对原始数据上表现更差的同时，大多数NAT模型都被培训为在教师模型生成的蒸馏数据上的学生模型，称为序列级知识蒸馏。提高模型性能的有效培训策略是自蒸馏混合（SDM）培训，预先训练原始数据模型，通过预先训练的模型本身产生蒸馏数据，最后重新列举模型原始数据和蒸馏数据的组合。在这项工作中，我们的目标是查看NAT模型的SDM，但发现直接采用SDM到NAT模型在翻译质量方面没有改进。通过仔细分析，我们观察失效与教师模型与NAT学生模型的建模和确认偏差相关。基于这些发现，我们提出了一种增强的策略，通过向经典SDM添加两个阶段来提高名为SDMRT的策略：一个是在自蒸馏数据上进行预重磅，另一个是对滤波后的教师蒸馏数据进行微调。我们的结果在多个NAT模型上以0.6至1.2 bleu表示基础。作为另一个奖励，对于迭代细化NAT模型，我们的方法可以在半迭代号内倾斜基线，这意味着2x加速度。

在本文中，我们提出了一种新的生成模型，逐步逐步的去噪AutoEncoder（Sundae），不依赖于自回归模型。类似地与去噪扩散技术，在从随机输入开始并从随机输入开始并每次直到收敛改善它们时，日出施加Sundae。我们提出了一个简单的新改进运算符，它比扩散方法更少迭代，同时在定性地在自然语言数据集上产生更好的样本。Sundae在WMT'14英语到德语翻译任务上实现最先进的结果（非自回归方法），在巨大清洁的常见爬网数据集和Python代码的数据集上对无条件语言建模的良好定性结果来自GitHub。通过在模板中填充任意空白模式，Sundae的非自动增加性质开辟了超出左右提示的可能性。

最近非自动增加（NAR）机器翻译最近取得了显着的改进，现在优于一些基准测试的自动增加（AR）模型，为AR推断提供有效的替代方案。然而，虽然AR转换通常使用多语言模型来实现，但是从语言之间的转移和改善的服务效率，多语言NAR模型仍然相对未开发。作为一个示例NAR模型和变压器作为半NAR模型，采用连接员时间分类（CTC），我们展示了多语种NAR的全面实证研究。我们在容量限制下对相关语言与负转移之间的积极转移来测试其能力。随着NAR模型需要蒸馏培训套，我们仔细研究双语与多语种教师的影响。最后，我们适合多语言NAR的缩放法，这使得其相对于AR模型的性能随着模型量表的增加而定量。

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is usually done via sequence-level knowledge distillation (Seq-KD) from a full-sentence neural machine translation (NMT) model. However, there is still a significant performance gap between NMT and SiMT. In this work, we propose to leverage monolingual data to improve SiMT, which trains a SiMT student on the combination of bilingual data and external monolingual data distilled by Seq-KD. Preliminary experiments on En-Zh and En-Ja news domain corpora demonstrate that monolingual data can significantly improve translation quality (e.g., +3.15 BLEU on En-Zh). Inspired by the behavior of human simultaneous interpreters, we propose a novel monolingual sampling strategy for SiMT, considering both chunk length and monotonicity. Experimental results show that our sampling strategy consistently outperforms the random sampling strategy (and other conventional typical NMT monolingual sampling strategies) by avoiding the key problem of SiMT -- hallucination, and has better scalability. We achieve +0.72 BLEU improvements on average against random sampling on En-Zh and En-Ja. Data and codes can be found at https://github.com/hexuandeng/Mono4SiMT.

在几乎所有文本生成应用中，Word序列在左右（L2R）或左右（R2L）方式中构造，因为自然语言句子是写入L2R或R2L。但是，我们发现自然语言书面订单对文本生成至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种螺旋语言建模（SLM），这是一种普遍的方法，使人们能够构建超出L2R和R2L订单的自然语言句子。 SLM允许其中一个从结果文本内的任意令牌开始，并在所选的任意令牌中展开REST令牌。它使解码顺序除了语言模型困惑之外的新优化目标，这进一步提高了所生成文本的分集和质量。此外，SLM使得可以通过选择正确的开始令牌来操纵文本构建过程。 SLM还将生成排序引入了额外的正则化，以提高低资源方案中的模型稳健性。 8次广泛研究的神经机翻译（NMT）任务的实验表明，与传统的L2R解码方法相比，SLM高达4.7 BLEU增加。

Recently, non-autoregressive (NAR) neural machine translation models have received increasing attention due to their efficient parallel decoding. However, the probabilistic framework of NAR models necessitates conditional independence assumption on target sequences, falling short of characterizing human language data. This drawback results in less informative learning signals for NAR models under conventional MLE training, thereby yielding unsatisfactory accuracy compared to their autoregressive (AR) counterparts. In this paper, we propose a simple and model-agnostic multi-task learning framework to provide more informative learning signals. During training stage, we introduce a set of sufficiently weak AR decoders that solely rely on the information provided by NAR decoder to make prediction, forcing the NAR decoder to become stronger or else it will be unable to support its weak AR partners. Experiments on WMT and IWSLT datasets show that our approach can consistently improve accuracy of multiple NAR baselines without adding any additional decoding overhead.

通常使用自回归生成模型，尤其是对于涉及顺序数据的那些任务。然而，由于链式有条件建模的内在特征（例如，暴露偏见或缺乏远距离连贯性），由于许多固有的缺陷而困扰着它们，严重限制了它们正确模型分布的能力。在本文中，我们提出了一种独特的方法，该方法称为训练自回旋生成模型，以利用精心设计的基于能量的学习目标。通过利用SoftMax操作的额外自由度，我们被允许使自回归模型本身成为基于能量的模型，用于衡量输入的可能性，而无需引入任何额外的参数。此外，我们表明可以有效地训练电子臂，并能够减轻暴露偏置问题并增加自回归生成模型的时间连贯性。广泛的经验结果涵盖了语言建模，神经机器翻译和图像产生等基准，证明了拟议方法的有效性。

神经文本生成模型可能遭受低多样性问题。已经提出了各种解码策略和基于培训的方法仅通过利用上下文特征来促进多样性，但很少他们考虑纳入句法结构线索。在这项工作中，我们建议使用语言注释，即演讲（POS），来指导文本生成。详细地，我们将POS引导SoftMax介绍以显式模拟两个后部概率：（i）下一页POS，（ii）来自目标POS的词汇的下一个令牌。进一步提出POS导游采样策略来解决POS的多样性来解决低多样性问题。广泛的实验和人类评估表明，与现有最先进的方法相比，我们的POS引导的Softmax和采样（POSG）可以在保持相当的质量的同时产生更多样化的文本。

Minimum Bayesian Risk Decoding (MBR) emerges as a promising decoding algorithm in Neural Machine Translation. However, MBR performs poorly with label smoothing, which is surprising as label smoothing provides decent improvement with beam search and improves generality in various tasks. In this work, we show that the issue arises from the un-consistency of label smoothing on the token-level and sequence-level distributions. We demonstrate that even though label smoothing only causes a slight change in the token-level, the sequence-level distribution is highly skewed. We coin the issue \emph{distributional over-smoothness}. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective method, Distributional Cooling MBR (DC-MBR), which manipulates the entropy of output distributions by tuning down the Softmax temperature. We theoretically prove the equivalence between pre-tuning label smoothing factor and distributional cooling. Experiments on NMT benchmarks validate that distributional cooling improves MBR's efficiency and effectiveness in various settings.

Diffusion models have quickly become the go-to paradigm for generative modelling of perceptual signals (such as images and sound) through iterative refinement. Their success hinges on the fact that the underlying physical phenomena are continuous. For inherently discrete and categorical data such as language, various diffusion-inspired alternatives have been proposed. However, the continuous nature of diffusion models conveys many benefits, and in this work we endeavour to preserve it. We propose CDCD, a framework for modelling categorical data with diffusion models that are continuous both in time and input space. We demonstrate its efficacy on several language modelling tasks.

Although continually extending an existing NMT model to new domains or languages has attracted intensive interest in recent years, the equally valuable problem of continually improving a given NMT model in its domain by leveraging knowledge from an unlimited number of existing NMT models is not explored yet. To facilitate the study, we propose a formal definition for the problem named knowledge accumulation for NMT (KA-NMT) with corresponding datasets and evaluation metrics and develop a novel method for KA-NMT. We investigate a novel knowledge detection algorithm to identify beneficial knowledge from existing models at token level, and propose to learn from beneficial knowledge and learn against other knowledge simultaneously to improve learning efficiency. To alleviate catastrophic forgetting, we further propose to transfer knowledge from previous to current version of the given model. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method significantly and consistently outperforms representative baselines under homogeneous, heterogeneous, and malicious model settings for different language pairs.

It is well believed that the higher uncertainty in a word of the caption, the more inter-correlated context information is required to determine it. However, current image captioning methods usually consider the generation of all words in a sentence sequentially and equally. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware image captioning framework, which parallelly and iteratively operates insertion of discontinuous candidate words between existing words from easy to difficult until converged. We hypothesize that high-uncertainty words in a sentence need more prior information to make a correct decision and should be produced at a later stage. The resulting non-autoregressive hierarchy makes the caption generation explainable and intuitive. Specifically, we utilize an image-conditioned bag-of-word model to measure the word uncertainty and apply a dynamic programming algorithm to construct the training pairs. During inference, we devise an uncertainty-adaptive parallel beam search technique that yields an empirically logarithmic time complexity. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO benchmark reveal that our approach outperforms the strong baseline and related methods on both captioning quality as well as decoding speed.

嘈杂的频道模型在神经机翻译（NMT）中特别有效。然而，最近的方法如“波束搜索和重新划分”（BSR）在推理期间引起了大量的计算开销，使实际应用不可行。我们的目标是建立一个摊销嘈杂的频道NMT模型，使得从它贪婪解码将生成转换，以最大化与使用BSR生成的翻译相同的奖励。我们尝试三种方法：知识蒸馏，1阶梯偏差仿制学习和Q学习。第一方法获得来自伪语料库的噪声信道信号，后两种方法旨在直接针对嘈杂的通道MT奖励优化。所有三种级别的速度推动速度推断为1-2级。对于所有三种方法，所生成的翻译无法实现与BSR相当的奖励，但BLEU近似的翻译质量类似于BSR产生的翻译的质量。

Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application. However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model's ability to generalize to other domains, making the open-ended deployments of the adapted models prone to errors. This work introduces novel training objectives built upon a semantic similarity of the predicted tokens to the reference. Our results show that (1) avoiding the common assumption of a single correct prediction by constructing the training target from tokens' semantic similarity can mitigate catastrophic forgetting during domain adaptation, while (2) preserving the quality of the adaptation, (3) with negligible additions to compute costs. In the broader perspective, the objectives grounded in a soft token alignment pioneer the exploration of the middle ground between the efficient but naive exact-match token-level objectives and expressive but computationally- and resource-intensive sequential objectives.

原则上，将变异自动编码器（VAE）应用于顺序数据提供了一种用于控制序列生成，操纵和结构化表示学习的方法。但是，训练序列VAE具有挑战性：自回归解码器通常可以解释数据而无需使用潜在空间，即后置倒塌。为了减轻这种情况，最新的模型通过将均匀的随机辍学量应用于解码器输入来削弱强大的解码器。从理论上讲，我们表明，这可以消除解码器输入提供的点式互信息，该信息通过利用潜在空间来补偿。然后，我们提出了一种对抗性训练策略，以实现基于信息的随机辍学。与标准文本基准数据集上的均匀辍学相比，我们的目标方法同时提高了序列建模性能和潜在空间中捕获的信息。

Recently, contrastive learning attracts increasing interests in neural text generation as a new solution to alleviate the exposure bias problem. It introduces a sequence-level training signal which is crucial to generation tasks that always rely on auto-regressive decoding. However, previous methods using contrastive learning in neural text generation usually lead to inferior performance. In this paper, we analyse the underlying reasons and propose a new Contrastive Neural Text generation framework, CoNT. CoNT addresses bottlenecks that prevent contrastive learning from being widely adopted in generation tasks from three aspects -- the construction of contrastive examples, the choice of the contrastive loss, and the strategy in decoding. We validate CoNT on five generation tasks with ten benchmarks, including machine translation, summarization, code comment generation, data-to-text generation and commonsense generation. Experimental results show that CoNT clearly outperforms the conventional training framework on all the ten benchmarks with a convincing margin. Especially, CoNT surpasses previous the most competitive contrastive learning method for text generation, by 1.50 BLEU on machine translation and 1.77 ROUGE-1 on summarization, respectively. It achieves new state-of-the-art on summarization, code comment generation (without external data) and data-to-text generation.