Leveraging Diverse Modeling Contexts with Collaborating Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models are two types of generative models for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). AR models predict tokens in a word-by-word manner and can effectively capture the distribution of real translations. NAR models predict tokens by extracting bidirectional contextual information which can improve the inference speed but they suffer from performance degradation. Previous works utilized AR models to enhance NAR models by reducing the training data's complexity or incorporating the global information into AR models by virtue of NAR models. However, those investigated methods only take advantage of the contextual information of a single type of model while neglecting the diversity in the contextual information that can be provided by different types of models. In this paper, we propose a novel generic collaborative learning method, DCMCL, where AR and NAR models are treated as collaborators instead of teachers and students. To hierarchically leverage the bilateral contextual information, token-level mutual learning and sequence-level contrastive learning are adopted between AR and NAR models. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmarks show that the proposed DCMCL method can simultaneously improve both AR and NAR models with up to 1.38 and 2.98 BLEU scores respectively, and can also outperform the current best-unified model with up to 0.97 BLEU scores for both AR and NAR decoding.