{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/meta-back-translation-1","title":"Meta Back-translation","arxiv_id":"2102.07847","date":"2021-02-15","proceeding":"ICLR 2021 1","authors":["Hieu Pham","Xinyi Wang","Yiming Yang","Graham Neubig"],"abstract":"Back-translation is an effective strategy to improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation~(NMT) by generating pseudo-parallel data. However, several recent works have found that better translation quality of the pseudo-parallel data does not necessarily lead to better final translation models, while lower-quality but more diverse data often yields stronger results. In this paper, we propose a novel method to generate pseudo-parallel data from a pre-trained back-translation model. Our method is a meta-learning algorithm which adapts a pre-trained back-translation model so that the pseudo-parallel data it generates would train a forward-translation model to do well on a validation set. In our evaluations in both the standard datasets WMT En-De'14 and WMT En-Fr'14, as well as a multilingual translation setting, our method leads to significant improvements over strong baselines. Our code will be made available.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07847v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.07847v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"meta-back-translation-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research/google-research","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"nmt","task_name":"NMT"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2102.07847","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}