# Rephrasing the Reference for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16863 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16863/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (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)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06732/) (2015)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07086/) (2016)
- [Understanding Knowledge Distillation in Non-autoregressive Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02727/) (2019)
- [Fast Decoding in Sequence Models using Discrete Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03382/) (2018)
- [Glancing Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07905/) (2020)
- [Fully Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15833/) (2020)
- [Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation with Latent Alignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07437/) (2020)
- [FlowSeq: Non-Autoregressive Conditional Sequence Generation with Generative Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02480/) (2019)
- [The Optimal Reward Baseline for Gradient-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2315/) (2013)
- [A Study of Reinforcement Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08866/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Latent-Variable Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Deterministic Inference Using a Delta Posterior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07181/) (2019)
- [Order-Agnostic Cross Entropy for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05093/) (2021)
- [Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation with Auxiliary Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10245/) (2019)
- [Directed Acyclic Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07459/) (2022)
- [Minimizing the Bag-of-Ngrams Difference for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09320/) (2019)
- [Non-Autoregressive Translation with Layer-Wise Prediction and Deep Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07515/) (2021)
- [Guiding Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation Decoding with Reordering Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02215/) (2019)
- [ENGINE: Energy-Based Inference Networks for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00850/) (2020)
- [Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11405/) (2021)

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

- [Simultaneous Machine Translation with Tailored Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13588/) (2023)
- [FastDiSS: Few-step Match Many-step Diffusion Language Model on Sequence-to-Sequence Generation--Full Version](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05551/) (2026)
- [Optimizing Non-Autoregressive Transformers with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13667/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) models suffer from the multi-modality problem that there may exist multiple possible translations of a source sentence, so the reference sentence may be inappropriate for the training when the NAT output is closer to other translations. In response to this problem, we introduce a rephraser to provide a better training target for NAT by rephrasing the reference sentence according to the NAT output. As we train NAT based on the rephraser output rather than the reference sentence, the rephraser output should fit well with the NAT output and not deviate too far from the reference, which can be quantified as reward functions and optimized by reinforcement learning. Experiments on major WMT benchmarks and NAT baselines show that our approach consistently improves the translation quality of NAT. Specifically, our best variant achieves comparable performance to the autoregressive Transformer, while being 14.7 times more efficient in inference.