Rastislav Rabatin

Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li et al.

Language model pretraining generally targets a broad range of use cases and incorporates data from diverse sources. However, there are instances where we desire a model that excels in specific areas without markedly compromising performance in other areas. A cost-effective and straightforward approach is sampling with low-dimensional data features, which allows to select large-scale pretraining data for domain-specific use cases. In this work, we revisit importance sampling with n-gram features consisting of multi-granular tokens, which strikes a good balance between sentence compression and representation capabilities. We observed the sampled data to have a high correlation with the target downstream task performance while preserving its effectiveness on other tasks. This leads to the proposed data sampling paradigm where language models can be pretrained more efficiently on selected documents. On eight benchmarks we demonstrate with $\sim$1% of the data, pretrained models perform on par with the full RefinedWeb data and outperform randomly selected samples for model sizes ranging from 125M to 1.5B.

Zeeshan Ahmed, Frank Seide, Zhe Liu et al.

Simultaneous or streaming machine translation generates translation while reading the input stream. These systems face a quality/latency trade-off, aiming to achieve high translation quality similar to non-streaming models with minimal latency. We propose an approach that efficiently manages this trade-off. By enhancing a pretrained non-streaming model, which was trained with a seq2seq mechanism and represents the upper bound in quality, we convert it into a streaming model by utilizing the alignment between source and target tokens. This alignment is used to learn a read/write decision boundary for reliable translation generation with minimal input. During training, the model learns the decision boundary through a read/write policy module, employing supervised learning on the alignment points (pseudo labels). The read/write policy module, a small binary classification unit, can control the quality/latency trade-off during inference. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several strong baselines and narrows the gap with the non-streaming baseline model.

Rastislav Rabatin, Frank Seide, Ernie Chang

We adapt the well-known beam-search algorithm for machine translation to operate in a cascaded real-time speech translation system. This proved to be more complex than initially anticipated, due to four key challenges: (1) real-time processing of intermediate and final transcriptions with incomplete words from ASR, (2) emitting intermediate and final translations with minimal user perceived latency, (3) handling beam search hypotheses that have unequal length and different model state, and (4) handling sentence boundaries. Previous work in the field of simultaneous machine translation only implemented greedy decoding. We present a beam-search realization that handles all of the above, providing guidance through the minefield of challenges. Our approach increases the BLEU score by 1 point compared to greedy search, reduces the CPU time by up to 40% and character flicker rate by 20+% compared to a baseline heuristic that just retranslates input repeatedly.