# Sockeye 3: Fast Neural Machine Translation with PyTorch

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05851 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05851/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11125/) (2020)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Scaling Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00187/) (2018)
- [MXNet: A Flexible and Efficient Machine Learning Library for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01274/) (2015)
- [CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04944/) (2019)
- [Linguistic Input Features Improve Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02892/) (2016)
- [Controlling the Output Length of Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10408/) (2019)
- [CoCoA-MT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Contrastive Controlled MT with Application to Formality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04022/) (2022)
- [Marian: Cost-effective High-Quality Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12096/) (2018)
- [JParaCrawl: A Large Scale Web-Based English-Japanese Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10668/) (2019)
- [Compact Personalized Models for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01990/) (2018)
- [Isometric MT: Neural Machine Translation for Automatic Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08682/) (2021)
- [The Sockeye 2 Neural Machine Translation Toolkit at AMTA 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04885/) (2020)
- [The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Vocabulary Selection in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06618/) (2022)
- [Sharp Models on Dull Hardware: Fast and Accurate Neural Machine Translation Decoding on the CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01991/) (2017)
- [Faithful Target Attribute Prediction in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12105/) (2021)

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

- [MT-GenEval: A Counterfactual and Contextual Dataset for Evaluating Gender Accuracy in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01355/) (2022)
- [An Open-Source Gloss-Based Baseline for Spoken to Signed Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17714/) (2023)
- [Meaningful Pose-Based Sign Language Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07453/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sockeye 3 is the latest version of the Sockeye toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Now based on PyTorch, Sockeye 3 provides faster model implementations and more advanced features with a further streamlined codebase. This enables broader experimentation with faster iteration, efficient training of stronger and faster models, and the flexibility to move new ideas quickly from research to production. When running comparable models, Sockeye 3 is up to 126% faster than other PyTorch implementations on GPUs and up to 292% faster on CPUs. Sockeye 3 is open source software released under the Apache 2.0 license.