MvSR-NAT: Multi-view Subset Regularization for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

Conditional masked language models (CMLM) have shown impressive progress in non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT). They learn the conditional translation model by predicting the random masked subset in the target sentence. Based on the CMLM framework, we introduce Multi-view Subset Regularization (MvSR), a novel regularization method to improve the performance of the NAT model. Specifically, MvSR consists of two parts: (1) shared mask consistency: we forward the same target with different mask strategies, and encourage the predictions of shared mask positions to be consistent with each other. (2) model consistency, we maintain an exponential moving average of the model weights, and enforce the predictions to be consistent between the average model and the online model. Without changing the CMLM-based architecture, our approach achieves remarkable performance on three public benchmarks with 0.7-1.15 BLEU gains over previous NAT models. And, we reduce the gap to the stronger Transformer baseline.