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Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs (arxiv.org)
4 points by headalgorithm on Aug 1, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The model is trained on tricky, slightly altered source sentences and tricky target sentences, made by nudging words in whatever direction most hurts its accuracy. It beat the usual translation system by 2.8 quality points on Chinese-English and held up better on noisy text.

Abstract

Neural machine translation (NMT) often suffers from the vulnerability to noisy perturbations in the input. We propose an approach to improving the robustness of NMT models, which consists of two parts: (1) attack the translation model with adversarial source examples; (2) defend the translation model with adversarial target inputs to improve its robustness against the adversarial source inputs.For the generation of adversarial inputs, we propose a gradient-based method to craft adversarial examples informed by the translation loss over the clean inputs.Experimental results on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements ($2.8$ and $1.6$ BLEU points) over Transformer on standard clean benchmarks as well as exhibiting higher robustness on noisy data.

Yong Cheng, Lu Jiang, Wolfgang Macherey
arXiv:1906.02443 · cs.CL · submitted Jun 6, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by ACL 2019

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