Mixed Cross Entropy Loss for Neural Machine Translation

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Requirements and Installation

Our implementation is based on the implemetation of OR-Transfomer and Fairseq 0.9.0.

The code has been tested in the following enviroment:

• Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
• Python == 3.7

To install:

• conda create -n mix python=3.7
• conda activate mix
• git clone https://github.com/haorannlp/mix
• cd mix
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• pip install --editable .

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Data Preparation

WMT'16 Ro-En

• Downlaod WMT'16 En-Ro data from https://github.com/nyu-dl/dl4mt-nonauto
• Create a folder named wmt16_ro_en under examples/translation/
• Extract the corpus.bpe.en/ro, dev.bpe.en/ro, test.bpe.en/ro to the the folder created above

• TEXT=examples/translation/wmt16_ro_en
  # run the following command under "mix" directory
  fairseq-preprocess  --source-lang ro --target-lang en 
        --trainpref $TEXT/corpus.bpe --validpref  $TEXT/dev.bpe --testpref $TEXT/test.bpe 
        --destdir data-bin/wmt16_ro_en --thresholdtgt 0 --thresholdsrc 0 
        --workers 20

WMT'16 Ru-En

• cd examples/translation
• Get the link to download 1mcorpus.zip from https://translate.yandex.ru/corpus?lang=en
• mkdir orig_wmt16ru2en, put 1mcorpus.zip in this folder and unzip 1mcorpus.zip
• bash prepare-wmt16ru2en.sh (we did not include the wiki-titles dataset)

• TEXT=examples/translation/wmt16_ru_en
  # run the following command under "mix" directory
  fairseq-preprocess  --source-lang ru --target-lang en 
        --trainpref $TEXT/train --validpref  $TEXT/valid --testpref $TEXT/test 
        --destdir data-bin/wmt16_ru_en --thresholdtgt 0 --thresholdsrc 0 
        --workers 20

WMT'14 En-De

• cd examples/translation
• bash prepare-wmt14en2de-joint.sh --icml17 (we use newstest2013 as dev set)

• TEXT=examples/translation/wmt14_en_de_joint
  # run the following command under "mix" directory
  fairseq-preprocess  --source-lang en --target-lang de 
        --trainpref $TEXT/train --validpref  $TEXT/valid --testpref $TEXT/test 
        --destdir data-bin/wmt14_en_de --thresholdtgt 0 --thresholdsrc 0 
        --workers 20

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Training

We use random seeds 1111,2222,3333 for WMT'16 Ro-En, WMT'16 Ru-En, random seeds 1,2,3 for WMT'14 En-De.

For complete training code, please refer to training_command/

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Generation

Single model

MODEL=./checkpoints_wmt16ro2en_teahcer_forcing_ce_seed_1111/

python generate.py ./data-bin/wmt16_ro_en --path  $MODEL/checkpoint_best.pt \
       --batch-size 512 --beam 5 --remove-bpe --quiet

Average model

# First averaging the models; make sure you've re-named the top-5 checkpoints
# as checkpoint1.pt,...,checkpoint5.pt
python scripts/average_checkpoints.py --inputs $MODEL \
       --num-epoch-checkpoints 5 --checkpoint-upper-bound 5 --output $MODEL/top_5.pt

python generate.py ./data-bin/wmt16_ro_en --path $MODEL/top_5.pt \
       --batch-size 512 --beam 5 --remove-bpe --quiet

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Citation

@InProceedings{pmlr-v139-li21n,
  title = 	 {Mixed Cross Entropy Loss for Neural Machine Translation},
  author =       {Li, Haoran and Lu, Wei},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {6425--6436},
  year = 	 {2021},
  volume = 	 {139},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {18--24 Jul},
  publisher = {PMLR},
}