Xian Qian

Wenda Xu, Xian Qian, Mingxuan Wang et al. · cmu

Is it possible to train a general metric for evaluating text generation quality without human annotated ratings? Existing learned metrics either perform unsatisfactorily across text generation tasks or require human ratings for training on specific tasks. In this paper, we propose SESCORE2, a self-supervised approach for training a model-based metric for text generation evaluation. The key concept is to synthesize realistic model mistakes by perturbing sentences retrieved from a corpus. The primary advantage of the SESCORE2 is its ease of extension to many other languages while providing reliable severity estimation. We evaluate SESCORE2 and previous methods on four text generation tasks across three languages. SESCORE2 outperforms unsupervised metric PRISM on four text generation evaluation benchmarks, with a Kendall improvement of 0.078. Surprisingly, SESCORE2 even outperforms the supervised BLEURT and COMET on multiple text generation tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/xu1998hz/SEScore2.

Xian Qian, Kai Hu, Jiaqiang Wang et al. · bytedance

This report describes our VolcTrans system for the WMT22 shared task on large-scale multilingual machine translation. We participated in the unconstrained track which allows the use of external resources. Our system is a transformerbased multilingual model trained on data from multiple sources including the public training set from the data track, NLLB data provided by Meta AI, self-collected parallel corpora, and pseudo bitext from back-translation. A series of heuristic rules clean both bilingual and monolingual texts. On the official test set, our system achieves 17.3 BLEU, 21.9 spBLEU, and 41.9 chrF2++ on average over all language pairs. The average inference speed is 11.5 sentences per second using a single Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/xian8/wmt22

Jiangtao Feng, Yi Zhou, Jun Zhang et al.

PARAGEN is a PyTorch-based NLP toolkit for further development on parallel generation. PARAGEN provides thirteen types of customizable plugins, helping users to experiment quickly with novel ideas across model architectures, optimization, and learning strategies. We implement various features, such as unlimited data loading and automatic model selection, to enhance its industrial usage. ParaGen is now deployed to support various research and industry applications at ByteDance. PARAGEN is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ParaGen.

Xiaohui Wang, Yang Wei, Ying Xiong et al.

Transformer-based neural models are used in many AI applications. Training these models is expensive, as it takes huge GPU resources and long duration. It is challenging because typical data like sentences have variable lengths, and Transformer's computation patterns are more complex than convolutional neural networks. Existing systems either only focus on model inference or optimization for only BERT-like encoder models. In this paper, we present LightSeq2, a system to accelerate training for a general family of Transformer models on GPUs. We propose a series of GPU optimization techniques tailored to the specific computation flow and memory access patterns of Transformer models. LightSeq2 supports many model architectures, including BERT (encoder-only), GPT (decoder-only), Transformer (encoder-decoder), and vision Transformer. Our experiments for a variety of models and benchmarks show that LightSeq2 is consistently faster (1.4-3.5x) than previous systems on different GPUs. In particular, it gains 308% training speedup compared with existing systems on a large public machine translation benchmark (WMT14 English-German).