Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: A Call for Clarity
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Abstract (arXiv)
Non-autoregressive approaches aim to improve the inference speed of translation models by only requiring a single forward pass to generate the output sequence instead of iteratively producing each predicted token. Consequently, their translation quality still tends to be inferior to their autoregressive counterparts due to several issues involving output token interdependence. In this work, we take a step back and revisit several techniques that have been proposed for improving non-autoregressive translation models and compare their combined translation quality and speed implications under third-party testing environments. We provide novel insights for establishing strong baselines using length prediction or CTC-based architecture variants and contribute standardized BLEU, chrF++, and TER scores using sacreBLEU on four translation tasks, which crucially have been missing as inconsistencies in the use of tokenized BLEU lead to deviations of up to 1.7 BLEU points. Our open-sourced code is integrated into fairseq for reproducibility.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 45 of its 72 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2022.
Builds on
45 of 72 references.
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33 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 2.
5 papers.
- 2023One Wide Feedforward is All You Needcited by 15
- 2025PIER: A Novel Metric for Evaluating What Matters in Code-Switchingcited by 11
- 2022Integrating Translation Memories into Non-Autoregressive Machine Translationcited by 5
- 2024What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation?cited by 1
- 2025Confidence-Modulated Speculative Decoding for Large Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025Confidence-Modulated Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models21 Aug 2025
- 2025PIER: A Novel Metric for Evaluating What Matters in Code-Switching16 Jan 2025
- 2024What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation?21 May 2024
- 2023One Wide Feedforward is All You Need4 Sep 2023
- 2022Integrating Translation Memories into Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation12 Oct 2022