# Simple and Effective Noisy Channel Modeling for Neural Machine Translation (Yee et al., 2019)
This page contains pointers to pre-trained models as well as instructions on how to run the reranking scripts.
## Citation:
```bibtex
@inproceedings{yee2019simple,
title={Simple and Effective Noisy Channel Modeling for Neural Machine Translation},
author={Kyra Yee and Yann Dauphin and Michael Auli},
booktitle={Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2019},
}
```
## Pre-trained Models:
Model | Description | Download
---|---|---
`transformer.noisychannel.de-en` | De->En Forward Model | [download (.tar.gz)](https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/forward_de2en.tar.bz2)
`transformer.noisychannel.en-de` | En->De Channel Model | [download (.tar.gz)](https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/backward_en2de.tar.bz2)
`transformer_lm.noisychannel.en` | En Language model | [download (.tar.gz)](https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/reranking_en_lm.tar.bz2)
Test Data: [newstest_wmt17](https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/wmt17test.tar.bz2)
## Example usage
```
mkdir rerank_example
curl https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/forward_de2en.tar.bz2 | tar xvjf - -C rerank_example
curl https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/backward_en2de.tar.bz2 | tar xvjf - -C rerank_example
curl https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/reranking_en_lm.tar.bz2 | tar xvjf - -C rerank_example
curl https://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/fairseq/models/noisychannel/wmt17test.tar.bz2 | tar xvjf - -C rerank_example
This page mainly includes instructions for reproducing results from the following papers
*[Levenshtein Transformer (Gu et al., 2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11006).
*[Understanding Knowledge Distillation in Non-autoregressive Machine Translation (Zhou et al., 2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02727).
We also provided our own implementations for several popular non-autoregressive-based models as reference:<br>
*[Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (Gu et al., 2017)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02281)<br>
*[Deterministic Non-Autoregressive Neural Sequence Modeling by Iterative Refinement (Lee et al., 2018)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06901)<br>
*[Insertion Transformer: Flexible Sequence Generation via Insertion Operations (Stern et al., 2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03249)<br>
*[Mask-Predict: Parallel Decoding of Conditional Masked Language Models (Ghazvininejad et al., 2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09324v2)<br>
*[Fast Structured Decoding for Sequence Models (Sun et al., 2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11555)
## Dataset
First, follow the [instructions to download and preprocess the WMT'14 En-De dataset](../translation#wmt14-english-to-german-convolutional).
Make sure to learn a joint vocabulary by passing the `--joined-dictionary` option to `fairseq-preprocess`.
### Knowledge Distillation
Following [Gu et al. 2019](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11006), [knowledge distillation](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07947) from an autoregressive model can effectively simplify the training data distribution, which is sometimes essential for NAT-based models to learn good translations.
The easiest way of performing distillation is to follow the [instructions of training a standard transformer model](../translation) on the same data, and then decode the training set to produce a distillation dataset for NAT.
### Download
We also provided the preprocessed [original](http://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/nat/original_dataset.zip) and [distillation](http://dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/nat/distill_dataset.zip) datasets. Please build the binarized dataset on your own.
## Train a model
Then we can train a nonautoregressive model using the `translation_lev` task and a new criterion `nat_loss`.
Use the `--noise` flag to specify the input noise used on the target sentences.
In default, we run the task for *Levenshtein Transformer*, with `--noise='random_delete'`. Full scripts to run other models can also be found [here](./scripts.md).
The following command will train a *Levenshtein Transformer* on the binarized dataset.
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch levenshtein_transformer \
--noise random_delete \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
## Translate
Once a model is trained, we can generate translations using an `iterative_refinement_generator` which will based on the model's initial output and iteratively read and greedily refine the translation until (1) the model predicts the same translations for two consecutive iterations; or (2) the generator reaches the maximum iterations (`--iter-decode-max-iter`). Use `--print-step` to check the actual # of iteration for each sentence.
For *Levenshtein Transformer*, it sometimes helps to apply a `--iter-decode-eos-penalty` (typically, 0~3) to penalize the model finishing generation too early and generating too short translations.
For example, to generate with `--iter-decode-max-iter=9`:
```bash
fairseq-generate \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--gen-subsettest\
--task translation_lev \
--path checkpoints/checkpoint_best.pt \
--iter-decode-max-iter 9 \
--iter-decode-eos-penalty 0 \
--beam 1 --remove-bpe\
--print-step\
--batch-size 400
```
In the end of the generation, we can see the tokenized BLEU score for the translation.
## Advanced Decoding Methods
### Ensemble
The NAT models use special implementations of [ensembling](https://github.com/fairinternal/fairseq-py/blob/b98d88da52f2f21f1b169bab8c70c1c4ca19a768/fairseq/sequence_generator.py#L522) to support iterative refinement and a variety of parallel operations in different models, while it shares the same API as standard autoregressive models as follows:
We use ``:`` to split multiple models. Note that, not all NAT models support ensembling for now.
### Length-beam
For models that predict lengths before decoding (e.g. the vanilla NAT, Mask-Predict, etc), it is possible to improve the translation quality by varying the target lengths around the predicted value, and translating the same example multiple times in parallel. We can select the best translation with the highest scores defined by your model's output.
Note that, not all models support length beams. For models which dynamically change the lengths (e.g. *Insertion Transformer*, *Levenshtein Transformer*), the same trick does not apply.
### Re-ranking
If the model generates multiple translations with length beam, we can also introduce an autoregressive model to rerank the translations considering scoring from an autoregressive model is much faster than decoding from that.
For example, to generate translations with length beam and reranking,
# Examples of Training scripts for Non-autoregressive Machine Translation models
### Non-autoregressive Transformer (NAT, Gu et al., 2017)
Note that we need to have an additional module to perform "length prediction" (`--length-loss-factor`) before generating the whole sequence.
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch nonautoregressive_transformer \
--noise full_mask \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--pred-length-offset\
--length-loss-factor 0.1 \
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
### Fast Structured Decoding for Sequence Models (NAT-CRF, Sun et al., 2019)
Note that we implemented a low-rank appromixated CRF model by setting `--crf-lowrank-approx=32` and `--crf-beam-approx=64` as discribed in the original paper. All other settings are the same as the vanilla NAT model.
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch nacrf_transformer \
--noise full_mask \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--pred-length-offset\
--length-loss-factor 0.1 \
--word-ins-loss-factor 0.5 \
--crf-lowrank-approx 32 \
--crf-beam-approx 64 \
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
### Non-autoregressive Transformer with Iterative Refinement (iNAT, Lee et al., 2018)
Note that `--train-step` means how many iterations of refinement we used during training, and `--dae-ratio` controls the ratio of denoising auto-encoder training described in the original paper.
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch iterative_nonautoregressive_transformer \
--noise full_mask \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--pred-length-offset\
--length-loss-factor 0.1 \
--train-step 4 \
--dae-ratio 0.5 \
--stochastic-approx\
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
### Insertion Transformer (InsT, Stern et al., 2019)
Note that we need to specify the "slot-loss" (uniform or balanced tree) described in the original paper. Here we use `--label-tau` to control the temperature.
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch insertion_transformer \
--noise random_delete \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
### Mask Predict (CMLM, Ghazvininejad et al., 2019)
```bash
fairseq-train \
data-bin/wmt14_en_de_distill \
--save-dir checkpoints \
--ddp-backend=legacy_ddp \
--task translation_lev \
--criterion nat_loss \
--arch cmlm_transformer \
--noise random_mask \
--share-all-embeddings\
--optimizer adam --adam-betas'(0.9,0.98)'\
--lr 0.0005 --lr-scheduler inverse_sqrt \
--stop-min-lr'1e-09'--warmup-updates 10000 \
--warmup-init-lr'1e-07'--label-smoothing 0.1 \
--dropout 0.3 --weight-decay 0.01 \
--decoder-learned-pos\
--encoder-learned-pos\
--apply-bert-init\
--log-format'simple'--log-interval 100 \
--fixed-validation-seed 7 \
--max-tokens 8000 \
--save-interval-updates 10000 \
--max-update 300000
```
### Levenshtein Transformer (LevT, Gu et al., 2019)
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# Example outputs:
# Delayed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the new date of the Games gives athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, which was rescheduled one year in response to the coronavirus (CV) pandemic, gives athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, provides athletes with time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The Games' new date, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new Games date, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives the athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, which was postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives the athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives athletes time to re-balance their training schedule.
# The new date of the Games, postponed one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, gives the athletes time to rebalance their schedule of training.
# The new date of the Games, postponed one year in response to the pandemic of coronavirus, gives the athletes time to rebalance their training schedule.
