IKUN for WMT24 General MT Task: LLMs Are here for Multilingual Machine Translation

This paper introduces two multilingual systems, IKUN and IKUN-C, developed for the general machine translation task in WMT24. IKUN and IKUN-C represent an open system and a constrained system, respectively, built on Llama-3-8b and Mistral-7B-v0.3. Both systems are designed to handle all 11 language directions using a single model. According to automatic evaluation metrics, IKUN-C achieved 6 first-place and 3 second-place finishes among all constrained systems, while IKUN secured 1 first-place and 2 second-place finishes across both open and constrained systems. These encouraging results suggest that large language models (LLMs) are nearing the level of proficiency required for effective multilingual machine translation. The systems are based on a two-stage approach: first, continuous pre-training on monolingual data in 10 languages, followed by fine-tuning on high-quality parallel data for 11 language directions. The primary difference between IKUN and IKUN-C lies in their monolingual pre-training strategy. IKUN-C is pre-trained using constrained monolingual data, whereas IKUN leverages monolingual data from the OSCAR dataset. In the second phase, both systems are fine-tuned on parallel data sourced from NTREX, Flores, and WMT16-23 for all 11 language pairs.

LiLiuM: eBay's Large Language Models for e-commerce

We introduce the LiLiuM series of large language models (LLMs): 1B, 7B, and 13B parameter models developed 100% in-house to fit eBay's specific needs in the e-commerce domain. This gives eBay full control over all aspects of the models including license, data, vocabulary, and architecture. We expect these models to be used as a foundation for fine-tuning and instruction-tuning, eliminating dependencies to external models. The LiLiuM LLMs have been trained on 3 trillion tokens of multilingual text from general and e-commerce domain. They perform similar to the popular LLaMA-2 models on English natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks. At the same time, we outperform LLaMA-2 on non-English NLU tasks, machine translation and on e-commerce specific downstream tasks. As part of our data mixture, we utilize the newly released RedPajama-V2 dataset for training and share our insights regarding data filtering and deduplication. We also discuss in detail how to serialize structured data for use in autoregressive language modeling. We provide insights on the effects of including code and parallel machine translation data in pre-training. Furthermore, we develop our own tokenizer and model vocabulary, customized towards e-commerce. This way, we can achieve up to 34% speed-up in text generation on eBay-specific downstream tasks compared to LLaMA-2. Finally, in relation to LLM pretraining, we show that checkpoint averaging can further improve over the best individual model checkpoint.

ITEm: Unsupervised Image-Text Embedding Learning for eCommerce

Product embedding serves as a cornerstone for a wide range of applications in eCommerce. The product embedding learned from multiple modalities shows significant improvement over that from a single modality, since different modalities provide complementary information. However, some modalities are more informatively dominant than others. How to teach a model to learn embedding from different modalities without neglecting information from the less dominant modality is challenging. We present an image-text embedding model (ITEm), an unsupervised learning method that is designed to better attend to image and text modalities. We extend BERT by (1) learning an embedding from text and image without knowing the regions of interest; (2) training a global representation to predict masked words and to construct masked image patches without their individual representations. We evaluate the pre-trained ITEm on two tasks: the search for extremely similar products and the prediction of product categories, showing substantial gains compared to strong baseline models.

Document-Level Language Models for Machine Translation

Despite the known limitations, most machine translation systems today still operate on the sentence-level. One reason for this is, that most parallel training data is only sentence-level aligned, without document-level meta information available. In this work, we set out to build context-aware translation systems utilizing document-level monolingual data instead. This can be achieved by combining any existing sentence-level translation model with a document-level language model. We improve existing approaches by leveraging recent advancements in model combination. Additionally, we propose novel weighting techniques that make the system combination more flexible and significantly reduce computational overhead. In a comprehensive evaluation on four diverse translation tasks, we show that our extensions improve document-targeted scores substantially and are also computationally more efficient. However, we also find that in most scenarios, back-translation gives even better results, at the cost of having to re-train the translation system. Finally, we explore language model fusion in the light of recent advancements in large language models. Our findings suggest that there might be strong potential in utilizing large language models via model combination.

Active Continual Learning: Labelling Queries in a Sequence of Tasks

Acquiring new knowledge without forgetting what has been learned in a sequence of tasks is the central focus of continual learning (CL). While tasks arrive sequentially, the training data are often prepared and annotated independently, leading to CL of incoming supervised learning tasks. This paper considers the under-explored problem of active continual learning (ACL) for a sequence of active learning (AL) tasks, where each incoming task includes a pool of unlabelled data and an annotation budget. We investigate the effectiveness and interplay between several AL and CL algorithms in the domain, class and task-incremental scenarios. Our experiments reveal the trade-off between two contrasting goals of not forgetting the old knowledge and the ability to quickly learn in CL and AL. While conditioning the query strategy on the annotations collected for the previous tasks leads to improved task performance on the domain and task incremental learning, our proposed forgetting-learning profile suggests a gap in balancing the effect of AL and CL for the class-incremental scenario.

Multi-armed bandits for online optimization of language model pre-training: the use case of dynamic masking

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) provide state-of-the-art performance in many modern natural language processing applications. TLM training is conducted in two phases. First, the model is pre-trained over large volumes of text to minimize a generic objective function, such as the Masked Language Model (MLM). Second, the model is fine-tuned in specific downstream tasks. Pre-training requires large volumes of data and high computational resources, while introducing many still unresolved design choices. For instance, selecting hyperparameters for language model pre-training is often carried out based on heuristics or grid-based searches. In this work, we propose a multi-armed bandit-based online optimization framework for the sequential selection of pre-training hyperparameters to optimize language model performance. We pose the pre-training procedure as a sequential decision-making task, where at each pre-training step, an agent must determine what hyperparameters to use towards optimizing the pre-training objective. We propose a Thompson sampling bandit algorithm, based on a surrogate Gaussian process reward model of the MLM pre-training objective, for its sequential minimization. We empirically show how the proposed Gaussian process based Thompson sampling pre-trains robust and well-performing language models. Namely, by sequentially selecting masking hyperparameters of the TLM, we achieve satisfactory performance in less epochs, not only in terms of the pre-training MLM objective, but in diverse downstream fine-tuning tasks. The proposed bandit-based technique provides an automated hyperparameter selection method for pre-training TLMs of interest to practitioners. In addition, our results indicate that, instead of MLM pre-training with fixed masking probabilities, sequentially adapting the masking hyperparameters improves both pre-training loss and downstream task metrics.

A Preordered RNN Layer Boosts Neural Machine Translation in Low Resource Settings

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are strong enough to convey semantic and syntactic information from the source language to the target language. However, these models are suffering from the need for a large amount of data to learn the parameters. As a result, for languages with scarce data, these models are at risk of underperforming. We propose to augment attention based neural network with reordering information to alleviate the lack of data. This augmentation improves the translation quality for both English to Persian and Persian to English by up to 6% BLEU absolute over the baseline models.

Towards Reinforcement Learning for Pivot-based Neural Machine Translation with Non-autoregressive Transformer

Pivot-based neural machine translation (NMT) is commonly used in low-resource setups, especially for translation between non-English language pairs. It benefits from using high resource source-pivot and pivot-target language pairs and an individual system is trained for both sub-tasks. However, these models have no connection during training, and the source-pivot model is not optimized to produce the best translation for the source-target task. In this work, we propose to train a pivot-based NMT system with the reinforcement learning (RL) approach, which has been investigated for various text generation tasks, including machine translation (MT). We utilize a non-autoregressive transformer and present an end-to-end pivot-based integrated model, enabling training on source-target data.

Integrated Training for Sequence-to-Sequence Models Using Non-Autoregressive Transformer

Complex natural language applications such as speech translation or pivot translation traditionally rely on cascaded models. However, cascaded models are known to be prone to error propagation and model discrepancy problems. Furthermore, there is no possibility of using end-to-end training data in conventional cascaded systems, meaning that the training data most suited for the task cannot be used. Previous studies suggested several approaches for integrated end-to-end training to overcome those problems, however they mostly rely on (synthetic or natural) three-way data. We propose a cascaded model based on the non-autoregressive Transformer that enables end-to-end training without the need for an explicit intermediate representation. This new architecture (i) avoids unnecessary early decisions that can cause errors which are then propagated throughout the cascaded models and (ii) utilizes the end-to-end training data directly. We conduct an evaluation on two pivot-based machine translation tasks, namely French-German and German-Czech. Our experimental results show that the proposed architecture yields an improvement of more than 2 BLEU for French-German over the cascaded baseline.

Back-translation for Large-Scale Multilingual Machine Translation

This paper illustrates our approach to the shared task on large-scale multilingual machine translation in the sixth conference on machine translation (WMT-21). This work aims to build a single multilingual translation system with a hypothesis that a universal cross-language representation leads to better multilingual translation performance. We extend the exploration of different back-translation methods from bilingual translation to multilingual translation. Better performance is obtained by the constrained sampling method, which is different from the finding of the bilingual translation. Besides, we also explore the effect of vocabularies and the amount of synthetic data. Surprisingly, the smaller size of vocabularies perform better, and the extensive monolingual English data offers a modest improvement. We submitted to both the small tasks and achieved the second place.