Datastore Distillation for Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

Nearest neighbor machine translation (i.e.,
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NN-MT) is a promising approach to enhance translation quality by equipping pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) models with the nearest neighbor retrieval. Despite its great success,
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NN-MT typically requires ample space to store its token-level datastore, causing
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NN-MT to be less practical in edge devices or online scenarios. In this paper, inspired by the concept of knowledge distillation, we provide a new perspective to ease the storage overhead by datastore distillation, which is formalized as a constrained optimization problem. We further design a novel model-agnostic iterative nearest neighbor merging method for the datastore distillation problem to obtain an effective and efficient solution. Experiments on three benchmark datasets indicate that our approach not only reduces the volume of the datastore by up to 50% without significant performance degradation, but also outperforms other baselines by a large margin at the same compression rate. Another experiment conducted on WikiText-103 further demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in the language model task.