@inproceedings{gao-etal-2024-efficient,
title = "Efficient $k$-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval",
author = "Gao, Yan and
Cao, Zhiwei and
Miao, Zhongjian and
Yang, Baosong and
Liu, Shiyu and
Zhang, Min and
Su, Jinsong",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.475",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.475",
pages = "7990--8001",
abstract = "To achieve non-parametric NMT domain adaptation, $k$-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation ($k$NN-MT) constructs an external datastore to store domain-specific translation knowledge, which derives a $k$NN distribution to interpolate the prediction distribution of the NMT model via a linear interpolation coefficient $\lambda$. Despite its success, $k$NN retrieval at each timestep leads to substantial time overhead. To address this issue, dominant studies resort to $k$NN-MT with adaptive retrieval ($k$NN-MT-AR), which dynamically estimates $\lambda$ and skips $k$NN retrieval if $\lambda$ is less than a fixed threshold. Unfortunately, $k$NN-MT-AR does not yield satisfactory results. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to reveal two key limitations of $k$NN-MT-AR: 1) the optimization gap leads to inaccurate estimation of $\lambda$ for determining $k$NN retrieval skipping, and 2) using a fixed threshold fails to accommodate the dynamic demands for $k$NN retrieval at different timesteps. To mitigate these limitations, we then propose $k$NN-MT with dynamic retrieval ($k$NN-MT-DR) that significantly extends vanilla $k$NN-MT in two aspects. Firstly, we equip $k$NN-MT with a MLP-based classifier for determining whether to skip $k$NN retrieval at each timestep. Particularly, we explore several carefully-designed scalar features to fully exert the potential of the classifier. Secondly, we propose a timestep-aware threshold adjustment method to dynamically generate the threshold, which further improves the efficiency of our model. Experimental results on the widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our model.",
}
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<abstract>To achieve non-parametric NMT domain adaptation, k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) constructs an external datastore to store domain-specific translation knowledge, which derives a kNN distribution to interpolate the prediction distribution of the NMT model via a linear interpolation coefficient łambda. Despite its success, kNN retrieval at each timestep leads to substantial time overhead. To address this issue, dominant studies resort to kNN-MT with adaptive retrieval (kNN-MT-AR), which dynamically estimates łambda and skips kNN retrieval if łambda is less than a fixed threshold. Unfortunately, kNN-MT-AR does not yield satisfactory results. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to reveal two key limitations of kNN-MT-AR: 1) the optimization gap leads to inaccurate estimation of łambda for determining kNN retrieval skipping, and 2) using a fixed threshold fails to accommodate the dynamic demands for kNN retrieval at different timesteps. To mitigate these limitations, we then propose kNN-MT with dynamic retrieval (kNN-MT-DR) that significantly extends vanilla kNN-MT in two aspects. Firstly, we equip kNN-MT with a MLP-based classifier for determining whether to skip kNN retrieval at each timestep. Particularly, we explore several carefully-designed scalar features to fully exert the potential of the classifier. Secondly, we propose a timestep-aware threshold adjustment method to dynamically generate the threshold, which further improves the efficiency of our model. Experimental results on the widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our model.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval
%A Gao, Yan
%A Cao, Zhiwei
%A Miao, Zhongjian
%A Yang, Baosong
%A Liu, Shiyu
%A Zhang, Min
%A Su, Jinsong
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand
%F gao-etal-2024-efficient
%X To achieve non-parametric NMT domain adaptation, k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) constructs an external datastore to store domain-specific translation knowledge, which derives a kNN distribution to interpolate the prediction distribution of the NMT model via a linear interpolation coefficient łambda. Despite its success, kNN retrieval at each timestep leads to substantial time overhead. To address this issue, dominant studies resort to kNN-MT with adaptive retrieval (kNN-MT-AR), which dynamically estimates łambda and skips kNN retrieval if łambda is less than a fixed threshold. Unfortunately, kNN-MT-AR does not yield satisfactory results. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to reveal two key limitations of kNN-MT-AR: 1) the optimization gap leads to inaccurate estimation of łambda for determining kNN retrieval skipping, and 2) using a fixed threshold fails to accommodate the dynamic demands for kNN retrieval at different timesteps. To mitigate these limitations, we then propose kNN-MT with dynamic retrieval (kNN-MT-DR) that significantly extends vanilla kNN-MT in two aspects. Firstly, we equip kNN-MT with a MLP-based classifier for determining whether to skip kNN retrieval at each timestep. Particularly, we explore several carefully-designed scalar features to fully exert the potential of the classifier. Secondly, we propose a timestep-aware threshold adjustment method to dynamically generate the threshold, which further improves the efficiency of our model. Experimental results on the widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our model.
%R 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.475
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.475
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.475
%P 7990-8001
Markdown (Informal)
[Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.475) (Gao et al., Findings 2024)
ACL