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FlowSeq: Non-Autoregressive Conditional Sequence Generation with Generative Flow

2019-09-05IJCNLP 2019Code Available1· sign in to hype

Xuezhe Ma, Chunting Zhou, Xi-An Li, Graham Neubig, Eduard Hovy

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Abstract

Most sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models are autoregressive; they generate each token by conditioning on previously generated tokens. In contrast, non-autoregressive seq2seq models generate all tokens in one pass, which leads to increased efficiency through parallel processing on hardware such as GPUs. However, directly modeling the joint distribution of all tokens simultaneously is challenging, and even with increasingly complex model structures accuracy lags significantly behind autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient, and effective model for non-autoregressive sequence generation using latent variable models. Specifically, we turn to generative flow, an elegant technique to model complex distributions using neural networks, and design several layers of flow tailored for modeling the conditional density of sequential latent variables. We evaluate this model on three neural machine translation (NMT) benchmark datasets, achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art non-autoregressive NMT models and almost constant decoding time w.r.t the sequence length.

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Benchmark Results

DatasetModelMetricClaimedVerifiedStatus
IWSLT2015 German-EnglishFlowSeq-baseBLEU score24.75Unverified
WMT2014 English-GermanFlowSeq-baseBLEU score18.55Unverified
WMT2014 English-GermanFlowSeq-largeBLEU score20.85Unverified
WMT2014 English-GermanFlowSeq-large (IWD n = 15)BLEU score22.94Unverified
WMT2014 English-GermanFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 15)BLEU score23.14Unverified
WMT2014 English-GermanFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 30)BLEU score23.64Unverified
WMT2014 German-EnglishFlowSeq-baseBLEU score23.36Unverified
WMT2014 German-EnglishFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 30)BLEU score28.29Unverified
WMT2014 German-EnglishFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 15)BLEU score27.71Unverified
WMT2014 German-EnglishFlowSeq-large (IWD n=15)BLEU score27.16Unverified
WMT2014 German-EnglishFlowSeq-largeBLEU score25.4Unverified
WMT2016 English-RomanianFlowSeq-baseBLEU score29.26Unverified
WMT2016 English-RomanianFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 30)BLEU score32.35Unverified
WMT2016 English-RomanianFlowSeq-large (NPD n=15)BLEU score31.97Unverified
WMT2016 English-RomanianFlowSeq-large (IWD n = 15)BLEU score31.08Unverified
WMT2016 English-RomanianFlowSeq-largeBLEU score29.86Unverified
WMT2016 Romanian-EnglishFlowSeq-baseBLEU score30.16Unverified
WMT2016 Romanian-EnglishFlowSeq-largeBLEU score30.69Unverified
WMT2016 Romanian-EnglishFlowSeq-large (IWD n = 15)BLEU score32.03Unverified
WMT2016 Romanian-EnglishFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 15)BLEU score32.46Unverified
WMT2016 Romanian-EnglishFlowSeq-large (NPD n = 30)BLEU score32.91Unverified

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