# Can Latent Alignments Improve Autoregressive Machine Translation?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09554 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09554/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09038/) (2016)
- [Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation with Latent Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07437/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Connectionist Temporal Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04719/) (2018)
- [Aligned Cross Entropy for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01655/) (2020)
- [Semi-Autoregressive Training Improves Mask-Predict Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08785/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Revisiting End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation From Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04571/) (2022)
- [CTC Alignments Improve Autoregressive Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05200/) (2022)
- [O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02359/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Latent alignment objectives such as CTC and AXE significantly improve non-autoregressive machine translation models. Can they improve autoregressive models as well? We explore the possibility of training autoregressive machine translation models with latent alignment objectives, and observe that, in practice, this approach results in degenerate models. We provide a theoretical explanation for these empirical results, and prove that latent alignment objectives are incompatible with teacher forcing.