Multilingual Machine Translation with Hyper-Adapters

Christos Baziotis, Mikel Artetxe, James Cross, Shruti Bhosale


Abstract
Multilingual machine translation suffers from negative interference across languages. A common solution is to relax parameter sharing with language-specific modules like adapters. However, adapters of related languages are unable to transfer information, and their total number of parameters becomes prohibitively expensive as the number of languages grows. In this work, we overcome these drawbacks using hyper-adapters – hyper-networks that generate adapters from language and layer embeddings. While past work had poor results when scaling hyper-networks, we propose a rescaling fix that significantly improves convergence and enables training larger hyper-networks. We find that hyper-adapters are more parameter efficient than regular adapters, reaching the same performance with up to 12 times less parameters. When using the same number of parameters and FLOPS, our approach consistently outperforms regular adapters. Also, hyper-adapters converge faster than alternative approaches and scale better than regular dense networks. Our analysis shows that hyper-adapters learn to encode language relatedness, enabling positive transfer across languages.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1170–1185
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.77
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.77
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christos Baziotis, Mikel Artetxe, James Cross, and Shruti Bhosale. 2022. Multilingual Machine Translation with Hyper-Adapters. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1170–1185, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Machine Translation with Hyper-Adapters (Baziotis et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.77.pdf
Data:
 2022.emnlp-main.77.data.zip