Federated Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
This addresses privacy-preserving machine translation for users in federated settings, but it is incremental as it builds on existing federated learning and nearest neighbor methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high communication overhead and inefficiency in federated learning for neural machine translation by proposing a federated nearest neighbor framework that uses one-round memorization-based interaction instead of multi-round model-based interactions, resulting in significantly reduced computational and communication costs while maintaining performance.
To protect user privacy and meet legal regulations, federated learning (FL) is attracting significant attention. Training neural machine translation (NMT) models with traditional FL algorithm (e.g., FedAvg) typically relies on multi-round model-based interactions. However, it is impractical and inefficient for machine translation tasks due to the vast communication overheads and heavy synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel federated nearest neighbor (FedNN) machine translation framework that, instead of multi-round model-based interactions, leverages one-round memorization-based interaction to share knowledge across different clients to build low-overhead privacy-preserving systems. The whole approach equips the public NMT model trained on large-scale accessible data with a $k$-nearest-neighbor ($$kNN) classifier and integrates the external datastore constructed by private text data in all clients to form the final FL model. A two-phase datastore encryption strategy is introduced to achieve privacy-preserving during this process. Extensive experiments show that FedNN significantly reduces computational and communication costs compared with FedAvg, while maintaining promising performance in different FL settings.