Blog
The latest from Google Research
Robust Neural Machine Translation
Monday, July 29, 2019
Posted by Yong Cheng, Software Engineer, Google Research
In recent years,
neural machine translation
(NMT) using
Transformer models
has experienced tremendous success. Based on
deep neural networks
, NMT models are usually trained end-to-end on very large parallel corpora (input/output text pairs) in an entirely data-driven fashion and without the need to impose explicit rules of language.
Despite this huge success, NMT models can be sensitive to minor perturbations of the input, which can manifest as a variety of different errors, such as under-translation, over-translation or mistranslation. For example, given a German sentence, the state-of-the-art NMT model,
Transformer
, will yield a correct translation.
“Der Sprecher des Untersuchungsausschusses hat angekündigt, vor Gericht zu ziehen, falls sich die
geladenen
Zeugen weiterhin weigern sollten, eine Aussage zu machen.”
(Machine translation to English:
“The spokesman of the Committee of Inquiry has announced that if the witnesses summoned continue to refuse to testify, he will be brought to court.”
),
But, when we apply a subtle change to the input sentence, say from
geladenen
to the synonym
vorgeladenen
, the translation becomes very different (and in this case, incorrect):
“Der Sprecher des Untersuchungsausschusses hat angekündigt, vor Gericht zu ziehen, falls sich die
vorgeladenen
Zeugen weiterhin weigern sollten, eine Aussage zu machen.”
(Machine translation to English:
“The investigative committee has announced that he will be brought to justice if the witnesses who have been invited continue to refuse to testify.”
).
This lack of robustness in NMT models prevents many commercial systems from being applicable to tasks that cannot tolerate this level of instability. Therefore, learning robust translation models is not just desirable, but is often required in many scenarios. Yet, while the robustness of neural networks has been extensively studied in the computer vision community, only a few prior studies on learning robust NMT models can be found in literature.
In “
Robust Neural Machine Translation with Doubly Adversarial Inputs
” (to appear at
ACL 2019
), we propose an approach that uses generated adversarial examples to improve the stability of machine translation models against small perturbations in the input. We learn a robust NMT model to directly overcome adversarial examples generated with knowledge of the model and with the intent of distorting the model predictions. We show that this approach improves the performance of the NMT model on standard benchmarks.
Training a Model with AdvGen
An ideal NMT model would generate similar translations for separate inputs that exhibit small differences. The idea behind our approach is to perturb a translation model with adversarial inputs in the hope of improving the model’s robustness. It does this using an algorithm called Adversarial Generation (AdvGen
),
which generates plausible adversarial examples for perturbing the model and then feeds them back into the model for defensive training. While this method is inspired by the idea of
generative adversarial networks
(GANs), it does not rely on a discriminator network, but simply applies the adversarial example in training, effectively diversifying and extending the training set.
The first step is to perturb the model using AdvGen. We start by using Transformer to calculate the translation loss based on a source input sentence, a target input sentence and a target output sentence. Then AdvGen randomly selects some words in the source sentence, assuming a uniform distribution. Each word has an associated list of similar words, i.e., candidates that can be used for substitution, from which AdvGen selects the word that is most likely to introduce errors in Transformer output. Then, this generated adversarial sentence is fed back into Transformer, initiating the defense stage.
First, the Transformer model is applied to an input sentence (
lower left
) and, in conjunction with the target output sentence (
above right
) and target input sentence (
middle right;
beginning with the placeholder “<sos>”), the translation loss is calculated. The AdvGen function then takes the source sentence, word selection distribution, word candidates, and the translation loss as inputs to construct an adversarial source example.
During the defend stage, the adversarial sentence is fed back into the Transformer model. Again the translation loss is calculated, but this time using the adversarial source input. Using the same method as above, AdvGen uses the target input sentence, word replacement candidates, the word selection distribution calculated by the attention matrix, and the translation loss to construct an adversarial
target
example.
In the defense stage, the adversarial source example serves as input to the Transformer model, and the translation loss is calculated. AdvGen then uses the same method as above to generate an adversarial target example from the target input.
Finally, the adversarial sentence is fed back into Transformer and the robustness loss using the adversarial source example, the adversarial target input example and the target sentence is calculated. If the perturbation led to a significant loss, the loss is minimized so that when the model is confronted with similar perturbations, it will not repeat the same mistake. On the other hand, if the perturbation leads to a low loss, nothing happens, indicating that the model can already handle this perturbation.
Model Performance
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying it to the standard Chinese-English and English-German translation benchmarks. We observed a notable improvement of 2.8 and 1.6
BLEU
points, respectively, compared to the competitive Transformer model, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance.
Comparison of Transformer model (Vaswani et al., 2017) on standard benchmarks.
We then evaluate our model on a noisy dataset, generated using a procedure similar to that described for AdvGen. We take an input clean dataset, such as that used on standard translation benchmarks, and randomly select words for similar word substitution. We find that our model exhibits improved robustness compared to other recent models.
Comparison of Transformer,
Miyao et al.
and
Cheng et al.
on artificial noisy inputs.
These results show that our method is able to overcome small perturbations in the input sentence and improve the generalization performance. It outperforms competitive translation models and achieves state-of-the-art translation performance on standard benchmarks. We hope our translation model will serve as a robust building block for improving many downstream tasks, especially when those are sensitive or intolerant to imperfect translation input.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted by Yong Cheng, Lu Jiang and Wolfgang Macherey. Additional thanks go to our leadership Andrew Moore and Julia (Wenli) Zhu.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
materials science
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Responsible AI
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2022
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
