Papers › Non-autoregressive Translation with Disentangled Context Transformer

Non-autoregressive Translation with Disentangled Context Transformer

1 Jan 2020ICML 2020 1archive 2025-07-28

Jungo Kasai, James Cross, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Jiatao Gu

State-of-the-art neural machine translation models generate a translation from left to right and every step is conditioned on the previously generated tokens. The sequential nature of this generation process causes fundamental latency in inference since we cannot generate multiple tokens in each sentence in parallel. We propose an attention-masking based model, called Disentangled Context (DisCo) transformer, that simultaneously generates all tokens given different contexts. The DisCo transformer is trained to predict every output token given an arbitrary subset of the other reference tokens. We also develop the parallel easy-first inference algorithm, which iteratively refines every token in parallel and reduces the number of required iterations. Our extensive experiments on 7 translation directions with varying data sizes demonstrate that our model achieves competitive, if not better, performance compared to the state of the art in non-autoregressive machine translation while significantly reducing decoding time on average.

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Tasks

Machine TranslationSentenceTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Machine Translation WMT2014 English-German DisCo + Mask-Predict (non-autoregressive) BLEU score 27.06 #53 of 91 Archive leaderboard report

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