Bojie Hu


2022

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Speeding up Transformer Decoding via an Attention Refinement Network
Kaixin Wu | Yue Zhang | Bojie Hu | Tong Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Despite the revolutionary advances made by Transformer in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), inference efficiency remains an obstacle due to the heavy use of attention operations in auto-regressive decoding. We thereby propose a lightweight attention structure called Attention Refinement Network (ARN) for speeding up Transformer. Specifically, we design a weighted residual network, which reconstructs the attention by reusing the features across layers. To further improve the Transformer efficiency, we merge the self-attention and cross-attention components for parallel computing. Extensive experiments on ten WMT machine translation tasks show that the proposed model yields an average of 1.35x faster (with almost no decrease in BLEU) over the state-of-the-art inference implementation. Results on widely used WMT14 En-De machine translation tasks demonstrate that our model achieves a higher speed-up, giving highly competitive performance compared to AAN and SAN models with fewer parameter numbers.

2021

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TenTrans Multilingual Low-Resource Translation System for WMT21 Indo-European Languages Task
Han Yang | Bojie Hu | Wanying Xie | Ambyera Han | Pan Liu | Jinan Xu | Qi Ju
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes TenTrans’ submission to WMT21 Multilingual Low-Resource Translation shared task for the Romance language pairs. This task focuses on improving translation quality from Catalan to Occitan, Romanian and Italian, with the assistance of related high-resource languages. We mainly utilize back-translation, pivot-based methods, multilingual models, pre-trained model fine-tuning, and in-domain knowledge transfer to improve the translation quality. On the test set, our best-submitted system achieves an average of 43.45 case-sensitive BLEU scores across all low-resource pairs. Our data, code, and pre-trained models used in this work are available in TenTrans evaluation examples.

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TenTrans Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation System for WMT21
Wanying Xie | Bojie Hu | Han Yang | Dong Yu | Qi Ju
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes TenTrans large-scale multilingual machine translation system for WMT 2021. We participate in the Small Track 2 in five South East Asian languages, thirty directions: Javanese, Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, Tamil, English. We mainly utilized forward/back-translation, in-domain data selection, knowledge distillation, and gradual fine-tuning from the pre-trained model FLORES-101. We find that forward/back-translation significantly improves the translation results, data selection and gradual fine-tuning are particularly effective during adapting domain, while knowledge distillation brings slight performance improvement. Also, model averaging is used to further improve the translation performance based on these systems. Our final system achieves an average BLEU score of 28.89 across thirty directions on the test set.

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TenTrans High-Performance Inference Toolkit for WMT2021 Efficiency Task
Kaixin Wu | Bojie Hu | Qi Ju
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

The paper describes the TenTrans’s submissions to the WMT 2021 Efficiency Shared Task. We explore training a variety of smaller compact transformer models using the teacher-student setup. Our model is trained by our self-developed open-source multilingual training platform TenTrans-Py. We also release an open-source high-performance inference toolkit for transformer models and the code is written in C++ completely. All additional optimizations are built on top of the inference engine including attention caching, kernel fusion, early-stop, and several other optimizations. In our submissions, the fastest system can translate more than 22,000 tokens per second with a single Tesla P4 while maintaining 38.36 BLEU on En-De newstest2019. Our trained models and more details are available in TenTrans-Decoding competition examples.

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Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders
Chen Xu | Bojie Hu | Yanyang Li | Yuhao Zhang | Shen Huang | Qi Ju | Tong Xiao | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Encoder pre-training is promising in end-to-end Speech Translation (ST), given the fact that speech-to-translation data is scarce. But ST encoders are not simple instances of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Machine Translation (MT) encoders. For example, we find that ASR encoders lack the global context representation, which is necessary for translation, whereas MT encoders are not designed to deal with long but locally attentive acoustic sequences. In this work, we propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding (SATE) method for speech translation. Our encoder begins with processing the acoustic sequence as usual, but later behaves more like an MT encoder for a global representation of the input sequence. In this way, it is straightforward to incorporate the pre-trained models into the system. Also, we develop an adaptor module to alleviate the representation inconsistency between the pre-trained ASR encoder and MT encoder, and develop a multi-teacher knowledge distillation method to preserve the pre-training knowledge. Experimental results on the LibriSpeech En-Fr and MuST-C En-De ST tasks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2. To our knowledge, we are the first to develop an end-to-end ST system that achieves comparable or even better BLEU performance than the cascaded ST counterpart when large-scale ASR and MT data is available.

2020

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CSP:Code-Switching Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation
Zhen Yang | Bojie Hu | Ambyera Han | Shen Huang | Qi Ju
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

This paper proposes a new pre-training method, called Code-Switching Pre-training (CSP for short) for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Unlike traditional pre-training method which randomly masks some fragments of the input sentence, the proposed CSP randomly replaces some words in the source sentence with their translation words in the target language. Specifically, we firstly perform lexicon induction with unsupervised word embedding mapping between the source and target languages, and then randomly replace some words in the input sentence with their translation words according to the extracted translation lexicons. CSP adopts the encoder-decoder framework: its encoder takes the code-mixed sentence as input, and its decoder predicts the replaced fragment of the input sentence. In this way, CSP is able to pre-train the NMT model by explicitly making the most of the alignment information extracted from the source and target monolingual corpus. Additionally, we relieve the pretrain-finetune discrepancy caused by the artificial symbols like [mask]. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on unsupervised and supervised NMT. Experimental results show that CSP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods.

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Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Chen Xu | Bojie Hu | Yufan Jiang | Kai Feng | Zeyang Wang | Shen Huang | Qi Ju | Tong Xiao | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Large amounts of data has made neural machine translation (NMT) a big success in recent years. But it is still a challenge if we train these models on small-scale corpora. In this case, the way of using data appears to be more important. Here, we investigate the effective use of training data for low-resource NMT. In particular, we propose a dynamic curriculum learning (DCL) method to reorder training samples in training. Unlike previous work, we do not use a static scoring function for reordering. Instead, the order of training samples is dynamically determined in two ways - loss decline and model competence. This eases training by highlighting easy samples that the current model has enough competence to learn. We test our DCL method in a Transformer-based system. Experimental results show that DCL outperforms several strong baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De.

2018

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TencentFmRD Neural Machine Translation for WMT18
Bojie Hu | Ambyer Han | Shen Huang
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system of TencentFmRD for Chinese↔English news translation tasks of WMT 2018. Our systems are neural machine translation systems trained with our original system TenTrans. TenTrans is an improved NMT system based on Transformer self-attention mechanism. In addition to the basic settings of Transformer training, TenTrans uses multi-model fusion techniques, multiple features reranking, different segmentation models and joint learning. Finally, we adopt some data selection strategies to fine-tune the trained system and achieve a stable performance improvement. Our Chinese→English system achieved the second best BLEU scores and fourth best cased BLEU scores among all WMT18 submitted systems.