We propose a conditional non-autoregressive neural sequence model based on iterative refinement. The proposed model is designed based on the principles of latent variable models and denoising autoencoders, and is generally applicable to any sequence generation task. We extensively evaluate the proposed model on machine translation (En-De and En-Ro) and image caption generation, and observe that it significantly speeds up decoding while maintaining the generation quality comparable to the autoregressive counterpart.
Task | Dataset | Model | Metric name | Metric value | Global rank | Compare |
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Machine Translation | IWSLT2015 English-German | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 27.01 | # 4 | |
Machine Translation | IWSLT2015 German-English | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 32.43 | # 7 | |
Machine Translation | WMT2014 English-German | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 21.54 | # 21 | |
Machine Translation | WMT2014 German-English | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 25.43 | # 1 | |
Machine Translation | WMT2016 English-Romanian | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 29.66 | # 3 | |
Machine Translation | WMT2016 Romanian-English | Denoising autoencoders (non-autoregressive) | BLEU score | 30.30 | # 4 |