Papers › A Streaming Approach For Efficient Batched Beam Search

A Streaming Approach For Efficient Batched Beam Search

5 Oct 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2010.02164archive 2025-07-28

Kevin Yang, Violet Yao, John DeNero, Dan Klein

We propose an efficient batching strategy for variable-length decoding on GPU architectures. During decoding, when candidates terminate or are pruned according to heuristics, our streaming approach periodically "refills" the batch before proceeding with a selected subset of candidates. We apply our method to variable-width beam search on a state-of-the-art machine translation model. Our method decreases runtime by up to 71% compared to a fixed-width beam search baseline and 17% compared to a variable-width baseline, while matching baselines' BLEU. Finally, experiments show that our method can speed up decoding in other domains, such as semantic and syntactic parsing.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

yangkevin2/emnlp2020-stream-beam-mt officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Machine TranslationTranslation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections