Conventional knowledge distillation(KD) approaches are commonly employed to compress neural machine translation(NMT) models. However, they only obtain one lightweight student each time. Consequently, we have to conduct KD multiple times when different students are required at the same time, which could be resource-intensive. Additionally, these students are individually optimized, and thus lack interactions with each other, leading to their potential not being fully exerted. In this work, we propose a novel All-In-One Knowledge Distillation(AIO-KD) framework for NMT, which generates multiple satisfactory students at once. Under AIO-KD, we first randomly extract fewer-layer subnetworks from the teacher as the sample students. Then, we jointly optimize the teacher and these students, where the students simultaneously learn the knowledge from the teacher and interact with other students via mutual learning. When utilized, we re-extract the candidate students, satisfying the specifications of various devices. Particularly, we adopt carefully-designed strategies for AIO-KD: 1) we dynamically detach gradients to prevent poorly-performed students from negatively affecting the teacher during the knowledge transfer, which could subsequently impact other students; 2) we design a two-stage mutual learning strategy, which alleviates the negative impacts of poorly-performed students on the early-stage student interactions. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and eco-friendliness of AIO-KD. Our source code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/AIO-KD.

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to extract the relations between entities from the input document that usually containing many difficultly-predicted entity pairs whose relations can only be predicted through relational inference. Existing methods usually directly predict the relations of all entity pairs of input document in a one-pass manner, ignoring the fact that predictions of some entity pairs heavily depend on the predicted results of other pairs. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel document-level RE model with iterative inference. Our model is mainly composed of two modules: 1) a base module expected to provide preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs; 2) an inference module introduced to refine these preliminary predictions by iteratively dealing with difficultly-predicted entity pairs depending on other pairs in an easy-to-hard manner. Unlike previous methods which only consider feature information of entity pairs, our inference module is equipped with two Extended Cross Attention units, allowing it to exploit both feature information and previous predictions of entity pairs during relational inference. Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage strategy to train our model. At the first stage, we only train our base module. During the second stage, we train the whole model, where contrastive learning is introduced to enhance the training of inference module. Experimental results on three commonly-used datasets show that our model consistently outperforms other competitive baselines.

Most existing methods on robust neural machine translation (NMT) construct adversarial examples by injecting noise into authentic examples and indiscriminately exploit two types of examples. They require the model to translate both the authentic source sentence and its adversarial counterpart into the identical target sentence within the same training stage, which may be a suboptimal choice to achieve robust NMT. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to confirm this claim and further propose an Iterative Scheduled Data-switch Training Framework to mitigate this problem. Specifically, we introduce two training stages, iteratively switching between authentic and adversarial examples. Compared with previous studies, our model focuses more on just one type of examples at each single stage, which can better exploit authentic and adversarial examples, and thus obtaining a better robust NMT model. Moreover, we introduce an improved curriculum learning method with a sampling strategy to better schedule the process of noise injection. Experimental results show that our model significantly surpasses several competitive baselines on four translation benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/RobustNMT-ISDST.

Continual Language Learning (CLL) in multilingual translation is inevitable when new languages are required to be translated. Due to the lack of unified and generalized benchmarks, the evaluation of existing methods is greatly influenced by experimental design which usually has a big gap from the industrial demands. In this work, we propose the first Continual Language Learning Evaluation benchmark CLLE in multilingual translation. CLLE consists of a Chinese-centric corpus — CN-25 and two CLL tasks — the close-distance language continual learning task and the language family continual learning task designed for real and disparate demands. Different from existing translation benchmarks, CLLE considers several restrictions for CLL, including domain distribution alignment, content overlap, language diversity, and the balance of corpus. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework COMETA based on Constrained Optimization and META-learning to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and dependency on history training data by using a meta-model to retain the important parameters for old languages. Our experiments prove that CLLE is a challenging CLL benchmark and that our proposed method is effective when compared with other strong baselines. Due to the construction of the corpus, the task designing and the evaluation method are independent of the centric language, we also construct and release the English-centric corpus EN-25 to facilitate academic research.