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\title{Reinforcement Learning for Bandit Neural Machine Translation with Simulated Human Feedback} |
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\author{Khanh Nguyen\idcs\idumiacs \and Hal Daum{\'e} III\idcs\idlsc\idumiacs\idmsr \and Jordan Boyd-Graber\idcs\idlsc\idischool\idumiacs \\ |
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University of Maryland: Computer Science\idcs, Language Science\idlsc, iSchool\idischool, UMIACS\idumiacs\\ |
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Microsoft Research, New York\idmsr\\ |
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\tt{ \{kxnguyen,hal,jbg\}@umiacs.umd.edu } |
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} |
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\date{} |
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\begin{document} |
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\maketitle |
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\begin{abstract} |
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Machine translation is a natural candidate problem for reinforcement |
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learning from human feedback: users provide quick, dirty ratings on candidate translations |
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to guide a system to improve. Yet, current neural machine translation training focuses |
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on expensive human-generated reference translations. We describe a reinforcement learning algorithm that improves neural machine translation systems from simulated human feedback. |
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Our algorithm combines the advantage actor-critic algorithm~\cite{mnih2016asynchronous} |
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with the attention-based neural encoder-decoder architecture~\cite{luong2015effective}. |
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This algorithm (a) is well-designed for problems with a large action space and delayed rewards, |
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(b) effectively optimizes traditional corpus-level machine translation metrics, and |
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(c) is robust to skewed, high-variance, granular feedback modeled after actual human behaviors. |
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\end{abstract} |
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\section{Introduction} |
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Bandit structured prediction is the task of learning to solve complex joint prediction problems (like parsing or machine translation) under a very limited feedback model: |
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a system must produce a \emph{single} structured output (e.g., translation) and then the world |
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reveals a \emph{score} that measures how good or bad that output is, but provides neither a ``correct'' output nor feedback on any other possible output \cite{daume15lols,sokolov2015coactive}. |
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Because of the extreme sparsity of this feedback, a common experimental setup is that one pre-trains a good-but-not-great ``reference'' system based on whatever labeled data is available, and then seeks to improve it over time using this bandit feedback. |
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A common motivation for this problem setting is cost. |
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In the case of translation, bilingual ``experts'' can read a source sentence and a possible translation, and can much more quickly provide a rating of that translation than they can produce a full translation on their own. |
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Furthermore, one can often collect even less expensive ratings from ``non-experts'' who may or may not be bilingual \cite{hu2014crowdsourced}. |
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Breaking this reliance on expensive data could unlock previously |
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ignored languages and speed development of broad-coverage machine translation systems. |
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All work on bandit structured prediction we know makes an important simplifying assumption: the \emph{score} provided by the world is \emph{exactly} the score the system must optimize (\autoref{sec:problem}). |
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In the case of parsing, the score is attachment score; in the case of machine translation, the score is (sentence-level) \bleu. |
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While this simplifying assumption has been incredibly useful in building algorithms, it is highly unrealistic. |
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Any time we want to optimize a system by collecting user feedback, we must take into account: |
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\begin{enumerate}[noitemsep,nolistsep] |
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\item The metric we care about (e.g., expert ratings) may not correlate perfectly with the measure that the reference system was trained on (e.g., \bleu or log likelihood); |
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\item Human judgments might be more granular than traditional |
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continuous metrics (e.g., thumbs up vs. thumbs down); |
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\item Human feedback have high \emph{variance} (e.g., different raters |
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might give different responses given the same system output); |
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\item Human feedback might be substantially \emph{skewed} (e.g., a |
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rater may think all system outputs are poor). |
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\end{enumerate} |
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Our first contribution is a strategy to |
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simulate expert and non-expert ratings to evaluate the robustness of bandit structured prediction algorithms in general, in a more realistic environment (\autoref{sec:noise_model}). |
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We construct a family of perturbations to capture three attributes: \emph{granularity}, \emph{variance}, and \emph{skew}. |
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We apply these perturbations on automatically generated scores to simulate noisy human ratings. |
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To make our simulated ratings as realistic as possible, we study recent human evaluation data \cite{graham2017can} and fit models to match the noise profiles in actual human ratings (\autoref{sec:variance}). |
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Our second contribution is a reinforcement learning solution to bandit structured prediction and a study of its robustness to these simulated human ratings (\autoref{sec:method}).\footnote{Our code is at \url{https://github.com/khanhptnk/bandit-nmt} (in PyTorch).} |
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We combine an encoder-decoder architecture of machine translation~\cite{luong2015effective} with |
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the advantage actor-critic algorithm~\cite{mnih2016asynchronous}, yielding an approach that is |
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simple to implement but works on low-resource bandit machine translation. |
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Even with substantially restricted granularity, with high variance feedback, or with skewed rewards, this combination improves pre-trained models (\autoref{sec:results}). |
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In particular, under realistic settings of our noise parameters, the |
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algorithm's online reward and final held-out accuracies do not significantly degrade from a noise-free setting. |
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\section{Bandit Machine Translation} \label{sec:problem} |
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The bandit structured prediction problem \cite{daume15lols,sokolov2015coactive} is an extension of the contextual bandits problem \cite{kakade2008efficient,langford2008epoch} to structured prediction. |
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Bandit structured prediction operates over time $i=1 \dots K$ as: |
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\begin{enumerate}[nolistsep,noitemsep] |
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\item World reveals context $\vec x^{(i)}$ |
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\item Algorithm predicts structured output $\hat{\vec y}^{(i)}$ |
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\item World reveals reward $R \left(\hat{\vec y}^{(i)}, \vec x^{(i)} \right)$ |
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\end{enumerate} |
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We consider the problem of \emph{learning to translate from human ratings} in |
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a bandit structured prediction framework. |
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In each round, a translation model receives a source sentence $\vec x^{(i)}$, produces a |
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translation $\hat{\vec y}^{(i)}$, and receives a rating $R\left( \hat{\vec y}^{(i)}, \vec x^{(i)} \right)$ |
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from a human that reflects the quality of the translation. |
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We seek an algorithm that achieves high reward over $K$ rounds (high cumulative reward). |
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The challenge is that even though the model knows how good the translation is, |
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it knows neither \emph{where} its mistakes are nor \emph{what} the ``correct'' translation looks like. |
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It must balance exploration (finding new good predictions) with exploitation (producing predictions it already knows are good). |
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This is especially difficult in a task like machine translation, where, for a twenty token sentence with a vocabulary size of $50k$, there are approximately $10^{94}$ possible outputs, of which the algorithm gets to test exactly one. |
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\begin{figure}[t] |
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\centering |
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\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{images/facebook3} |
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\caption{A translation rating interface provided by Facebook. Users see a sentence followed by its machined-generated translation and can give ratings from one to five stars. } |
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\label{fig:facebook} |
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\end{figure} |
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Despite these challenges, learning from non-expert ratings is desirable. |
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In real-world scenarios, non-expert ratings are easy to collect but |
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other stronger forms of feedback are prohibitively expensive. |
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Platforms that offer translations can get quick feedback ``for free'' |
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from their users to improve their systems (Figure \ref{fig:facebook}). |
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Even in a setting in which annotators are paid, it is much less expensive to |
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ask a bilingual speaker to provide a rating of a proposed translation |
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than it is to pay a professional translator to produce one from scratch. |
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\ignore{ |
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Another scenario is when we want to train the translation model to adapt to user |
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preferences. |
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Since preferences are usually easy to perceive but hard to formalize, |
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it is easier for user to provide ratings based on their preferences than |
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to construct explicit examples.} |
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\section{Effective Algorithm for Bandit MT} \label{sec:method} |
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This section describes the |
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neural machine translation architecture of our system (\autoref{sec:neural_mt}). |
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We formulate bandit neural machine translation as a reinforcement learning |
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problem (\autoref{sec:formulation}) and discuss why standard |
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actor-critic algorithms struggle with this problem |
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(\autoref{sec:why_ac_fail}). |
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Finally, we describe a more effective training approach based on the advantage |
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actor-critic algorithm (\autoref{sec:a2c}). |
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\subsection{Neural machine translation} |
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\label{sec:neural_mt} |
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Our neural machine translation (NMT) model is a neural encoder-decoder |
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that directly computes |
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the probability of translating a |
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target sentence $\vec y = (y_1, \cdots, y_m)$ from source sentence $\vec x$: |
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\begin{align} |
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P_{\vec \theta}(\vec y \mid \vec x) = \prod_{t = 1}^m P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x) |
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\end{align} |
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where $P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x)$ is the probability of |
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outputting the next word $y_t$ at time step $t$ given a translation prefix $\vec y_{<t}$ and |
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a source sentence $\vec x$. |
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We use an encoder-decoder NMT architecture with global attention~\cite{luong2015effective}, where |
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both the encoder and decoder are recurrent neural networks (RNN) |
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(see Appendix~A for a more detailed description). |
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These models are normally trained by supervised learning, but as reference translations are |
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not available in our setting, we use reinforcement learning methods, which only require |
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numerical feedback to function. |
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\subsection{Bandit NMT as Reinforcement Learning} \label{sec:formulation} |
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NMT generating process can be viewed as a Markov decision process |
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on a continuous state space. |
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The states are the hidden vectors $\vec h_t^{dec}$ generated by the |
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decoder. |
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The action space is the target language's vocabulary. |
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To generate a translation from a source sentence $\vec x$, an NMT model starts at an |
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initial state |
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$\vec h_0^{dec}$: a representation of $\vec x$ computed by the encoder. |
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At time step $t$, the model decides the next action to take |
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by defining a stochastic policy $P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x)$, |
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which is directly parametrized by the parameters $\vec \theta$ of the model. |
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This policy takes the current state $\vec h_{t - 1}^{dec}$ as input and produces a |
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probability distribution over all actions (target vocabulary words). |
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The next action $\hat{y}_t$ is chosen by taking $\arg\max$ or sampling from this distribution. |
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The model computes the next state $\vec h_t^{dec}$ by updating |
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the current state $\vec h_{t - 1}^{dec}$ by the action taken $\hat{y}_t$. |
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The objective of bandit NMT is to find a policy that maximizes the expected |
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reward of translations sampled from the model's policy: |
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\begin{equation} |
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\max_{\vec \theta}\mathcal{L}_{pg}(\vec \theta) = |
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\max_{\vec \theta} \mathbb{E}_{\substack{\vec x \sim D_{\textrm{tr}}\\\hat{\vec y} \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot \mid \vec x)}} |
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\Big[ R(\hat{\vec y}, \vec x) \Big] |
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\label{eqn:reward_max} |
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\end{equation} where $D_{tr}$ is the training set and $R$ is the reward function (the rater).\footnote{Our raters are \emph{stochastic}, but for simplicity we denote the reward as a function; it should be expected reward.} |
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We optimize this objective function with policy gradient methods. |
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For a fixed $\vec x$, the gradient of the objective in \autoref{eqn:reward_max} is: |
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\begin{align} |
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\label{eqn:pg_grad} |
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& \nabla_{\vec \theta} \mathcal{L}_{pg}(\vec \theta) = |
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\mathbb{E}_{\hat{\vec y} \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot)} |
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\left[ R(\hat{\vec y}) \nabla_{\vec \theta} \log P_{\vec \theta}(\hat{\vec y}) \right] \\ |
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&= \mathbb{E}_{\substack{\hat{\vec y} \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot)}} |
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\Big[ |
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\sum_{t = 1}^m \sum_{y_t} |
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Q(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \hat{y}_t) |
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\nabla_{\vec \theta} |
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P_{\vec \theta}(\hat{y}_t \mid \hat{\vec y}_{<t}) |
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\Big] \nonumber |
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\end{align} where $Q(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \hat{y}_t)$ is the expected future reward of |
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$\hat{y}_t$ given the current prefix $\hat{\vec y}_{<t}$, then continuing |
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sampling from $P_{\vec \theta}$ to complete the translation: |
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\begin{align} |
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Q(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \hat{y}_t) &= |
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\mathbb{E}_{\hat{\vec y}' \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot \mid \vec x)} |
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\left[ |
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\tilde{R}(\hat{\vec y}', \vec x) |
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\right] \\ |
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\textrm{with } \tilde{R}(\hat{\vec y}', \vec x) & \equiv |
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R(\hat{\vec y}', \vec x) |
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\mathbbm{1} |
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\left\{ \hat{\vec y}'_{<t} = \hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \hat{y}'_t = \hat{y}_t \right\} \nonumber |
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\end{align} |
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$\mathbbm{1}\{\cdot\}$ is the indicator function, which returns 1 if the logic inside the bracket is true and returns 0 otherwise. |
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The gradient in \autoref{eqn:pg_grad} requires rating all possible |
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translations, which is not feasible in bandit NMT. |
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Na\"ive Monte Carlo reinforcement learning methods such as REINFORCE~\cite{williams1992simple} |
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estimates $Q$ values by sample means but yields very high variance when the action space is large, |
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leading to training instability. |
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\subsection{Why are actor-critic algorithms not effective for bandit NMT?} |
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\label{sec:why_ac_fail} |
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Reinforcement learning methods that rely on function approximation are preferred when tackling |
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bandit structured prediction with a large action space because they can capture |
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similarities between structures and generalize to unseen regions of the structure space. |
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The actor-critic algorithm~\cite{konda1999actor} uses function approximation to directly model |
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the $Q$ function, called the \emph{critic} model. |
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In our early attempts on bandit NMT, we adapted the actor-critic algorithm for NMT |
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in \citet{bahdanau2016actor}, which employs the algorithm in a supervised learning setting. |
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Specifically, while an encoder-decoder critic model $Q_{\vec \omega}$ |
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as a substitute for the |
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true $Q$ function in \autoref{eqn:pg_grad} enables |
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taking the full sum inside the expectation (because |
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the critic model can be queried with any state-action pair), we are unable to obtain reasonable results with this approach. |
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Nevertheless, insights into why this approach fails on our problem |
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explains the effectiveness of the approach discussed in the next section. |
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There are two properties in \citet{bahdanau2016actor} that our problem lacks but are key |
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elements for a successful actor-critic. |
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The first is access to reference translations: while the critic model is able |
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to observe reference translations during training in their setting, |
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bandit NMT assumes those are never available. |
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The second is per-step rewards: while the reward function in their setting |
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is known and can be exploited to compute immediate rewards after taking each action, |
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in bandit NMT, the actor-critic algorithm struggles with credit assignment |
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because it only receives reward when a translation is completed. |
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\citet{bahdanau2016actor} report that |
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the algorithm degrades if rewards are delayed until the end, |
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consistent with our observations. |
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With an enormous action space of bandit NMT, approximating gradients with the $Q$ critic model |
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induces biases and potentially drives the model to wrong optima. |
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Values of rarely taken actions are often overestimated without an explicit constraint between $Q$ values of actions (e.g., a sum-to-one constraint). |
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\citet{bahdanau2016actor} add an ad-hoc regularization term to the loss function to mitigate this issue and further stablizes the algorithm with a delay update scheme, but at the same time introduces extra tuning hyper-parameters. |
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\subsection{Advantage Actor-Critic for Bandit NMT} \label{sec:a2c} |
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We follow the approach of advantage actor-critic~\cite[A2C]{mnih2016asynchronous} and combine it with the neural encoder-decoder architecture. |
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The resulting algorithm---which we call NED-A2C---approximates the gradient in \autoref{eqn:pg_grad} |
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by a single sample $\hat{\vec y} \sim P(\cdot \mid \hat{\vec x})$ and centers the |
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reward $R(\hat{\vec y})$ using |
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the state-specific expected future reward $V(\hat{\vec y}_{<t})$ to reduce variance: |
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\begin{align} |
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\label{eqn:a2c_grad} |
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\nabla_{\vec \theta} \mathcal{L}_{pg}(\vec \theta) & \approx |
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\sum_{t = 1}^m |
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\bar{R}_t(\hat{\vec y}) |
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\nabla_{\vec \theta} |
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\log P_{\vec \theta}(\hat{y}_t \mid \hat{\vec y}_{<t}) \\ |
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\textrm{with }\bar{R}_t(\hat{\vec y}) &\equiv R(\hat{\vec y}) - V(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}) \nonumber \\ |
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V(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}) &\equiv \mathbb{E}_{\hat{y}'_t \sim P(\cdot \mid \hat{\vec y}_{<t})} |
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\left[ Q(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \hat{y}'_t) \right] \nonumber |
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\end{align} |
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We train a separate attention-based encoder-decoder model $V_{\vec \omega}$ to estimate |
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$V$ values. |
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This model encodes a source sentence $\vec x$ and decodes a sampled |
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translation $\hat{\vec y}$. |
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At time step $t$, it computes |
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$V_{\vec \omega}(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \vec x) = \vec w^{\top} \vec h_t^{crt}$, |
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where $\vec h^{crt}_t$ is the current decoder's hidden vector and |
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$\vec w$ is a learned weight vector. |
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The critic model minimizes the MSE between its estimates and the true |
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values: |
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\begin{align} |
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\label{eqn:vnet} |
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\mathcal{L}_{crt}(\vec \omega) & = \mathbb{E}_{\substack{\vec x \sim D_{\textrm{tr}}\\\hat{\vec y} \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot \mid \vec x)}} \left[ |
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\sum_{t = 1}^m L_t(\hat{\vec y}, \vec x) \right] \\ |
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\textrm{with } L_t(\hat{\vec y}, \vec x) & \equiv |
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\left[ |
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V_{\vec \omega}(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \vec x) - R(\hat{\vec y}, \vec x) \right]^2. \nonumber |
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\end{align} We use a gradient approximation to update $\vec \omega$ for a fixed $\vec x$ and $\hat{\vec y} \sim P(\cdot \mid \hat{\vec x})$: |
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\begin{equation} |
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\nabla_{\vec \omega} \mathcal{L}_{crt}(\vec \omega) \approx |
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\sum_{t = 1}^m \left[ |
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V_{\vec \omega}(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}) - R(\hat{\vec y}) |
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\right] |
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\nabla_{\vec \omega} V_{\vec \omega}(\hat{\vec y}_{<t}) |
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\label{eqn:critic_grad} |
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\end{equation} |
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NED-A2C is better suited for problems with a large action space and has other |
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advantages over actor-critic. |
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For large action spaces, approximating gradients using the $V$ critic model induces |
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lower biases than using the $Q$ critic model. |
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As implied by its definition, the $V$ model is robust to biases incurred by |
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rarely taken actions since rewards of those actions are weighted by very small |
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probabilities in the expectation. |
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In addition, the $V$ model has a much smaller |
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number of parameters and thus is more sample-efficient and more stable to train than the $Q$ model. |
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These attractive properties were not studied in A2C's original |
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paper~\cite{mnih2016asynchronous}. |
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\begin{algorithm} |
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\caption{The NED-A2C algorithm for bandit NMT.} |
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\label{alg:a2c} |
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\begin{algorithmic}[1] |
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\small |
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\FOR{$i = 1 \cdots K$} |
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\STATE receive a source sentence $\vec x^{(i)}$ |
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\STATE sample a translation: $\hat{\vec y}^{(i)} \sim P_{\vec \theta}(\cdot \mid \vec x^{(i)})$ |
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\STATE receive reward $R(\hat{\vec y}^{(i)}, \vec x^{(i)})$ |
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\STATE update the NMT model using \autoref{eqn:a2c_grad}. |
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\STATE update the critic model using \autoref{eqn:critic_grad}. |
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\ENDFOR |
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\end{algorithmic} |
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\end{algorithm} |
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Algorithm \ref{alg:a2c} summarizes NED-A2C for bandit NMT. |
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For each $\vec x$, we draw a single sample $\hat{\vec y}$ from the NMT model, which |
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is used for both estimating gradients of the NMT model and the critic model. |
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We run this algorithm with mini-batches of $\vec x$ and aggregate |
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gradients over all $\vec x$ in a mini-batch for each update. |
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Although our focus is on bandit NMT, this algorithm naturally works with any |
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bandit structured prediction problem. |
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\section{Modeling Imperfect Ratings} \label{sec:noise_model} |
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Our goal is to establish the feasibility of using \emph{real} human feedback to optimize a machine translation system, |
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in a setting where one can collect \emph{expert} feedback as well as a setting in which one only collects \emph{non-expert} feedback. |
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In all cases, we consider the expert feedback to be the ``gold standard'' that we wish to optimize. |
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To establish the feasibility of driving learning from human feedback \emph{without} doing a full, costly user study, we begin with a simulation study. |
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The key aspects (\autoref{fig:perturbation}) of human feedback we capture are: |
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(a) mismatch between training objective and feedback-maximizing objective, |
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(b) human ratings typically are binned (\autoref{sec:granular}), |
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(c) individual human ratings have high variance (\autoref{sec:variance}), |
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and (d) non-expert ratings can be skewed with respect to expert ratings (\autoref{sec:skew}). |
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In our simulated study, we begin by modeling gold standard human ratings using add-one-smoothed sentence-level \bleu~\cite{chen2014systematic}.\footnote{``Smoothing 2'' in~\citet{chen2014systematic}. We also add one to lengths when computing the brevity penalty.} |
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Our evaluation criteria, therefore, is average sentence-\bleu over the run of our algorithm. |
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However, in any realistic scenario, human feedback will vary from its average, and so the reward that our algorithm receives will be a \emph{perturbed} variant of sentence-\bleu. |
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In particular, if the sentence-\bleu score is $s \in [0, 1]$, the algorithm will only observe $s' \sim \textrm{pert}(s)$, where $\textrm{pert}$ is a perturbation distribution. |
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Because our reference machine translation system is pre-trained using log-likelihood, there is already an (a) mismatch between training objective and feedback, so we focus on (b-d) below. |
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\begin{figure}[t] |
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\centering |
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\includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{images/perturbation} |
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\caption{Examples of how our perturbation functions change the ``true'' |
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feedback distribution (left) to ones that better capture features |
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found in human feedback (right).} |
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\label{fig:perturbation} |
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\end{figure} |
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|
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\subsection{Humans Provide Granular Feedback} \label{sec:granular} |
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|
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When collecting human feedback, it is often more effective to collect discrete \emph{binned} scores. |
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A classic example is the Likert scale for human agreement \cite{likert:1932} or star ratings for product reviews. |
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Insisting that human judges provide continuous values (or feedback at too fine a |
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granularity) can demotivate raters without improving rating quality \cite{Preston20001}. |
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To model granular feedback, we use a simple rounding procedure. |
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Given an integer parameter $g$ for degree of granularity, we define: |
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\begin{align} |
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\textrm{pert}^{\textrm{gran}}(s;g) |
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&= \frac 1 g \textrm{round}(g s) |
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\end{align} |
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This perturbation function divides the range of possible outputs into $g+1$ bins. |
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For example, for $g=5$, we obtain bins $[0,0.1)$, $[0.1, 0.3)$, $[0.3, 0.5)$, $[0.5, 0.7)$, $[0.7, 0.9)$ and $[0.9,1.0]$. Since most sentence-\bleu scores are much closer to zero than to one, many of the larger bins are frequently vacant. |
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\subsection{Experts Have High Variance} \label{sec:variance} |
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Human feedback has high variance around its expected value. |
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A natural goal for a variance model of human annotators is to simulate---as closely as possible---how human raters actually perform. |
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We use human evaluation data recently collected as part of the WMT shared task~\cite{graham2017can}. |
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The data consist of 7200 sentences multiply annotated by giving non-expert annotators on Amazon Mechanical Turk a reference sentence and a \emph{single} system translation, and asking the raters to judge the adequacy of the translation.\footnote{Typical machine translation evaluations evaluate pairs and ask annotators to choose which is better.} |
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From these data, we treat the \emph{average} human rating as the ground truth and consider how individual human ratings vary around that mean. |
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To visualize these results with kernel density estimates (standard normal kernels) of the \emph{standard deviation}. |
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\autoref{fig:yvettedata} shows the mean rating (x-axis) and the deviation of the human ratings (y-axis) at each mean.\footnote{A current limitation of this model is that the simulated noise is i.i.d. conditioned on the rating (homoscedastic noise). While this is a stronger and more realistic model than assuming no noise, real noise is likely heteroscedastic: dependent on the input.}As expected, the standard deviation is small at the extremes and large in the middle (this is a bounded interval), with a fairly large range in the middle: |
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a translation whose average score is $50$ can get human evaluation scores anywhere between $20$ and $80$ with high probability. |
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We use a linear approximation to define our variance-based perturbation function as a Gaussian distribution, which is parameterized by a scale $\lambda$ that grows or shrinks the variances (when $\lambda=1$ this exactly matches the variance in the plot). |
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\renewcommand{\brack}[1]{\left\{\begin{array}{ll}#1\end{array}\right.} |
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\begin{align} |
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\textrm{pert}^{\textrm{var}}(s;\lambda) |
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&= \textrm{Nor}\left(s, \lambda \sigma(s)^2\right) \\ |
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\sigma(s) &= \brack{~~~0.64 s - 0.02 & \textrm{if } s < 50 \\ |
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-0.67 s + 67.0 & \textrm{otherwise} } \nonumber |
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\end{align} |
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\begin{figure}[t] |
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\centering |
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\includegraphics[width=\linewidth,clip=true,trim=35 22 61 311]{images/yvettedata.pdf} |
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\caption{Average rating (x-axis) versus a kernel density estimate of the variance of human ratings around that mean, with linear fits. |
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Human scores vary more around middling judgments than extreme judgments.} |
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\label{fig:yvettedata} |
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\end{figure} |
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\subsection{Non-Experts are Skewed from Experts} \label{sec:skew} |
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The preceding two noise models assume that the reward closely models the value we want to optimize (has the same mean). |
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This may not be the case with non-expert ratings. |
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Non-expert raters are skewed both for reinforcement learning \cite{thomaz2006reinforcement,thomaz2008teachable,loftin2014strategy} and recommender systems \cite{herlocker2000explaining,adomavicius2012impact}, but are typically bimodal: some are harsh (typically provide very low scores, even for ``okay'' outputs) and some are motivational (providing high scores for ``okay'' outputs). |
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We can model both harsh and motivations raters with a simple deterministic skew perturbation function, parametrized by a scalar $\rho \in [0,\infty)$: |
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\begin{align} |
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\textrm{pert}^{\textrm{skew}}(s;\rho) |
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&= s^\rho |
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\end{align} |
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For $\rho > 1$, the rater is harsh; for $\rho < 1$, the rater is motivational. |
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\section{Experimental Setup} \label{sec:experiment} |
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\begin{table}[t] |
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\centering |
|
\small |
|
\label{my-label} |
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\begin{tabular}{lll} |
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\toprule |
|
& De-En & Zh-En \\ \midrule |
|
Supervised training & 186K & 190K \\ |
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Bandit training & 167K & 165K \\ |
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Development & 7.7K & 7.9K \\ |
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Test & 9.1K & 7.4K \\ |
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\bottomrule |
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\end{tabular} |
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\caption{Sentence counts in data sets.} |
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\label{tab:data} |
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\end{table} |
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|
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We choose two language pairs from different language families with different typological properties: German-to-English and (De-En) and Chinese-to-English (Zh-En). |
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We use parallel transcriptions of TED talks for these pairs of languages |
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from the machine translation track of the IWSLT 2014 and 2015~\cite{cettolo2014report,cettolo2015iwslt,cettoloEtAl:EAMT2012}. |
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For each language pair, we split its data into four sets for supervised training, |
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bandit training, development and testing (Table \ref{tab:data}). |
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For English and German, we tokenize and clean sentences using Moses~\cite{koehn2007moses}. |
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For Chinese, we use the Stanford Chinese word segmenter \cite{chang08chinese} to segment sentences and tokenize. |
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We remove all sentences with length greater than 50, resulting in an average |
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sentence length of 18. |
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We use IWSLT 2015 data for supervised training and development, IWSLT 2014 data |
|
for bandit training and previous years' development and evaluation data for testing.\footnote{Over 95\% of the bandit learning set's sentences are seen during supervised learning. Performance gain on this set mainly reflects how well a model leverages weak learning signals (ratings) to improve previously made predictions. Generalizability is measured by performance gain on the test sets, which do not overlap the training sets.} |
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\subsection{Evaluation Framework} |
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For each task, we first use the supervised training set to pre-train |
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a reference NMT model using supervised learning. |
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On the same training set, we also pre-train the critic model with |
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translations sampled from the pre-trained NMT model. |
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Next, we enter a bandit learning mode where our models only observe the source |
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sentences of the bandit training set. |
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Unless specified differently, we train the NMT models with NED-A2C for one pass |
|
over the bandit training set. |
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If a perturbation function is applied to \persentence scores, it is only applied |
|
in this stage, not in the pre-training stage. |
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|
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We measure the \emph{improvement} $\Delta S$ of |
|
an evaluation metric $S$ due to bandit training: $\Delta S = S_{A2C} - S_{ref}$, where $S_{ref}$ is the metric computed on the reference models |
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and $S_{A2C}$ is the metric computed on models trained with NED-A2C. |
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Our primary interest is \emph{\persentence}: average sentence-level \bleu of translations that |
|
are sampled and scored during the bandit learning pass. |
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This metric represents average expert ratings, which we want to optimize for |
|
in real-world scenarios. |
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We also measure \emph{\heldout}: corpus-level \bleu on an unseen test set, where |
|
translations are greedily decoded by the NMT models. |
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This shows how much our method improves translation |
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quality, since corpus-level \bleu correlates better with human judgments |
|
than sentence-level \bleu. |
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|
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Because of randomness due to both the random sampling in the model for ``exploration'' as well as the randomness in the reward function, we repeat each experiment five times and |
|
report the mean results with 95\% confidence intervals. |
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|
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\subsection{Model configuration} |
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|
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Both the NMT model and the critic model are encoder-decoder models with global |
|
attention~\cite{luong2015effective}. |
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The encoder and the decoder are unidirectional single-layer LSTMs. |
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They have the same word embedding size and LSTM hidden size of 500. |
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The source and target vocabulary sizes are both 50K. |
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We do not use dropout in our experiments. |
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We train our models by the Adam optimizer \cite{kingma14adam} with |
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$\beta_1 = 0.9, \beta_2 = 0.999$ and a batch size of 64. |
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For Adam's $\alpha$ hyperparameter, we use $10^{-3}$ during pre-training and $10^{-4}$ during |
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bandit learning (for both the NMT model and the critic model). |
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During pre-training, starting from the fifth pass, we decay $\alpha$ by a factor of 0.5 when perplexity on the development set increases. |
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The NMT model reaches its highest corpus-level \bleu on the development set after |
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ten passes through the supervised training data, while the critic model's training error stabilizes |
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after five passes. |
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The training speed is 18s/batch for supervised pre-training and 41s/batch for |
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training with the NED-A2C algorithm. |
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\section{Results and Analysis} \label{sec:results} |
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In this section, we describe the results of our experiments, |
|
broken into the following questions: |
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how NED-A2C improves reference models (\autoref{sec:persentence}); |
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the effect the three perturbation functions have on the algorithm |
|
(\autoref{sec:perturb_results}); and whether the algorithm improves a corpus-level |
|
metric that corresponds well with human judgments (\autoref{sec:heldout_results}). |
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|
|
\subsection{Effectiveness of NED-A2C under Un-perturbed Bandit Feedback} |
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\label{sec:persentence} |
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|
|
\begin{table*}[!t] |
|
\small |
|
\centering |
|
\begin{tabular}{l|ccc|ccc} |
|
\toprule |
|
& \multicolumn{3}{c|}{De-En} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{Zh-En} \\ |
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& Reference & $\Delta_{sup}$ & $\Delta_{A2C}$ |
|
& Reference & $\Delta_{sup}$ & $\Delta_{A2C}$ \\ \midrule |
|
\multicolumn{7}{c}{Fully pre-trained reference model} \\ \midrule |
|
\persentence & 38.26 $\pm$ 0.02 & 0.07 $\pm$ 0.05 & \textbf{2.82 $\pm$ 0.03} |
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& 32.79 $\pm$ 0.01 & 0.36 $\pm$ 0.05 & \textbf{1.08 $\pm$ 0.03} \\ |
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\heldout & 24.94 $\pm$ 0.00 & 1.48 $\pm$ 0.00 & \textbf{1.82 $\pm$ 0.08} |
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& 13.73 $\pm$ 0.00 & \textbf{1.18 $\pm$ 0.00} & 0.86 $\pm$ 0.11 \\ \midrule |
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\multicolumn{7}{c}{Weakly pre-trained reference model} \\ \midrule |
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\persentence & 19.15 $\pm$ 0.01 & 2.94 $\pm$ 0.02 & \textbf{7.07 $\pm$ 0.06} |
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& 14.77 $\pm$ 0.01 & 1.11 $\pm$ 0.02 & \textbf{3.60 $\pm$ 0.04} \\ |
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\heldout & 19.63 $\pm$ 0.00 & \textbf{3.94 $\pm$ 0.00} & 1.61 $\pm$ 0.17 |
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& 9.34 $\pm$ 0.00 & \textbf{2.31 $\pm$ 0.00} & 0.92 $\pm$ 0.13 \\ \midrule |
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\end{tabular} |
|
\caption{Translation scores and improvements based on a single round of un-perturbed bandit feedback. \persentence and \heldout are not comparable: the former is sentence-\bleu, the latter is corpus-\bleu.} |
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\label{tab:clean_bleu} |
|
\end{table*} |
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|
|
We evaluate our method in an ideal setting where \emph{un-perturbed} \persentence simulates |
|
ratings during both training and evaluation (Table \ref{tab:clean_bleu}). |
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|
|
\paragraph{Single round of feedback.} |
|
In this setting, our models only observe each source sentence once and |
|
before producing its translation. |
|
On both De-En and Zh-En, NED-A2C improves \persentence of |
|
reference models |
|
after only a single pass (+2.82 and +1.08 respectively). |
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|
|
\paragraph{Poor initialization.} |
|
Policy gradient algorithms have difficulty improving from poor |
|
initializations, especially on problems with a large action space, because |
|
they use model-based exploration, which is ineffective when |
|
most actions have equal probabilities~\cite{bahdanau2016actor,ranzato2015sequence}. |
|
To see whether NED-A2C has this problem, we repeat the experiment with the same |
|
setup but with reference models pre-trained for only a single pass. |
|
Surprisingly, NED-A2C is highly effective at improving these poorly trained models |
|
(+7.07 on De-En and +3.60 on Zh-En in \persentence). |
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|
|
\paragraph{Comparisons with supervised learning.} |
|
To further demonstrate the effectiveness of NED-A2C, we compare it |
|
with training the reference models with supervised learning for a single pass on the bandit training set. |
|
Surprisingly, observing ground-truth translations barely improves the models in \persentence |
|
when they are fully trained (less than +0.4 on both tasks). |
|
A possible explanation is that the models have already reached full capacity and do not benefit |
|
from more examples.\footnote{This result may vary if the domains of the supervised learning set and the bandit training set are dissimilar. Our training data are all TED talks. } |
|
NED-A2C further enhances the models because it eliminates the mismatch between the supervised training objective and the evaluation objective. |
|
On weakly trained reference models, NED-A2C also significantly outperforms supervised learning ($\Delta$\persentence of NED-A2C is over three times as large as those of supervised learning). |
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|
|
\begin{figure}[t] |
|
\centering |
|
\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{images/learning_curve.pdf} |
|
\caption{Learning curves of models trained with NED-A2C for five epochs.} |
|
\label{fig:curves} |
|
\end{figure} |
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|
|
\paragraph{Multiple rounds of feedback.} |
|
We examine if NED-A2C can improve the models even further with multiple rounds of feedback.\footnote{The ability to receive feedback on the same example multiple times might |
|
not fit all use cases though.} |
|
With supervised learning, the models can memorize the reference translations |
|
but, in this case, the models have to be able to exploit and explore effectively. |
|
We train the models with NED-A2C for five passes and observe a much more significant |
|
$\Delta$\persentence than training for a single pass in both pairs of language |
|
(+6.73 on De-En and +4.56 on Zh-En) (\autoref{fig:curves}). |
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|
|
\begin{figure*}[!t] |
|
\centering |
|
\subcaptionbox{Granularity}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/bin_s_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
|
\subcaptionbox{Variance}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/noise_s_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
|
\subcaptionbox{Skew}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/bias_s_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
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|
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|
|
\subcaptionbox{Granularity}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/bin_c_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
|
\subcaptionbox{Variance}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/noise_c_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
|
\subcaptionbox{Skew}[.3\linewidth][c]{\includegraphics[width=.3\linewidth,clip=true,trim=28 15 28 8]{images/bias_c_bleu.pdf}\vspace{-2mm}} |
|
\caption{Performance gains of NMT models trained with NED-A2C in \persentence |
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(top row) and in \heldout(bottom row) under various degrees of granularity, |
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variance, and skew of scores. |
|
Performance gains of models trained with un-perturbed scores are within the |
|
shaded regions. |
|
} |
|
\label{fig:noise} |
|
\end{figure*} |
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|
|
|
\subsection{Effect of Perturbed Bandit Feedback} |
|
\label{sec:perturb_results} |
|
We apply perturbation functions defined in \autoref{sec:granular} to \persentence scores and |
|
use the perturbed scores as rewards during bandit training (\autoref{fig:noise}). |
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|
|
\paragraph{Granular Rewards.} We discretize raw \persentence scores using $\textrm{pert}^{gran}(s; g)$ (\autoref{sec:granular}). |
|
We vary $g$ from one to ten (number of bins varies from two to eleven). |
|
Compared to continuous rewards, for both pairs of languages, |
|
$\Delta$\persentence is not affected with $g$ at least five (at least six bins). |
|
As granularity decreases, $\Delta$\persentence monotonically degrades. |
|
However, even when $g = 1$ (scores are either 0 or 1), the models still improve by at least a point. |
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|
|
\paragraph{High-variance Rewards.} We simulate noisy rewards using the model of human rating variance |
|
$\textrm{pert}^{var}(s; \lambda)$ (\autoref{sec:variance}) with |
|
$\lambda \in \{0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 5 \}$. |
|
Our models can withstand an amount of about 20\% the variance in our human eval |
|
data without dropping in $\Delta$\persentence. |
|
When the amount of variance attains 100\%, matching the amount of variance in the human |
|
data, $\Delta$\persentence go down by |
|
about 30\% for both pairs of languages. |
|
As more variance is injected, the models degrade quickly but still improve from |
|
the pre-trained models. |
|
Variance is the most detrimental type of perturbation to NED-A2C |
|
among the three aspects of human ratings we model. |
|
|
|
\paragraph{Skewed Rewards.} We model skewed raters using $\textrm{pert}^{skew}(s; \rho)$ (\autoref{sec:skew}) with $\rho \in \{0.25, 0.5, 0.67, 1, 1.5, 2, 4\}$. |
|
NED-A2C is robust to skewed scores. |
|
$\Delta$\persentence is at least 90\% of unskewed scores for most skew values. |
|
Only when the scores are extremely harsh ($\rho = 4$) does $\Delta$\persentence degrade |
|
significantly (most dramatically by 35\% on Zh-En). |
|
At that degree of skew, a score of 0.3 is suppressed to be less than 0.08, giving |
|
little signal for the models to learn from. |
|
On the other spectrum, the models are less sensitive to motivating scores as |
|
\persentence is unaffected on Zh-En and only decreases by 7\% on De-En. |
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|
|
\subsection{Held-out Translation Quality} |
|
\label{sec:heldout_results} |
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|
|
Our method also improves pre-trained models in \heldout, a metric that |
|
correlates with translation quality better than \persentence |
|
(\autoref{tab:clean_bleu}). When scores are perturbed by our rating |
|
model, we observe similar patterns as with \persentence: the models |
|
are robust to most perturbations except when scores are very coarse, |
|
or very harsh, or have very high variance (\autoref{fig:noise}, second |
|
row). Supervised learning improves \heldout better, possibly because |
|
maximizing log-likelihood of reference translations correlates more |
|
strongly with maximizing \heldout of predicted translations than |
|
maximizing \persentence of predicted translations. |
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|
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|
|
\section{Related Work and Discussion} \label{sec:related} |
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|
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|
|
Ratings provided by humans can be used as effective learning signals |
|
for machines. |
|
Reinforcement learning has become the \textit{de facto} standard for |
|
incorporating this feedback across diverse tasks such as robot |
|
voice control~\cite{tenorio2010dynamic}, myoelectric control~\cite{pilarski2011online}, and virtual assistants~\cite{isbell2001social}. |
|
Recently, this learning framework has been combined with recurrent neural networks to solve |
|
machine translation~\cite{bahdanau2016actor}, dialogue generation~\cite{li2016deep}, neural architecture search~\cite{zoph2016neural}, and device placement~\cite{mirhoseini2017device}. |
|
Other approaches to more general structured prediction under bandit feedback \cite{daume15lols,sokolov2016learning,sokolov2016stochastic} show the broader efficacy of this framework. |
|
\citet{ranzato2015sequence} describe MIXER for training neural encoder-decoder models, |
|
which is a reinforcement learning approach closely related to ours but requires a policy-mixing strategy and only uses a linear critic model. |
|
Among work on bandit MT, ours is closest to \citet{kreutzer17bandit}, |
|
which also tackle this problem using neural encoder-decoder models, |
|
but we |
|
(a) take advantage of a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning method; |
|
(b) devise a strategy to simulate noisy rewards; and |
|
(c) demonstrate the robustness of our method on noisy simulated rewards. |
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|
|
Our results show that bandit feedback can be an effective |
|
feedback mechanism for neural machine translation systems. |
|
This is \emph{despite} that errors in human annotations hurt machine learning models in many NLP tasks~\cite{snow2008cheap}. |
|
An obvious question is whether we could extend our framework to model individual annotator preferences \cite{passonneau2014benefits} or learn personalized models \cite{mirkin2015motivating,rabinovich2016personalized}, and handle heteroscedastic noise \cite{park1966estimation,kersting2007most,antos2010active}. |
|
Another direction is to apply active learning techniques to reduce the |
|
sample complexity required to improve the systems or to extend to |
|
richer action spaces for problems like simultaneous translation, which requires |
|
prediction~\cite{Grissom:He:Boyd-Graber:Morgan-2014} and |
|
reordering~\cite{He-15} among other strategies to both minimize delay |
|
and effectively translate a sentence~\cite{He-2016}. |
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\section*{Acknowledgements} |
|
|
|
Many thanks to Yvette Graham for her help with the WMT human evaluations data. |
|
We thank UMD CLIP lab members for useful discussions that led to the |
|
ideas of this paper. |
|
We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and insightful comments. |
|
This work was supported by NSF grants IIS-1320538. |
|
Boyd-Graber is also partially supported by NSF grants IIS- |
|
1409287, IIS-1564275, IIS-IIS-1652666, and NCSE-1422492. |
|
Daum{\'e} III is also supported by NSF grant IIS-1618193, |
|
as well as an Amazon Research Award. |
|
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, |
|
or recommendations expressed here are those of |
|
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the |
|
sponsor(s). |
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|
|
\appendix |
|
\section{Neural MT Architecture} |
|
Our neural machine translation (NMT) model consists of an encoder and a decoder, |
|
each of which is a recurrent neural network (RNN). |
|
We closely follow \cite{luong2015effective} for the structure of our model. |
|
It directly models the posterior distribution |
|
$P_{\vec \theta}(\vec y \mid \vec x)$ of translating a source sentence $\vec x = (x_1, \cdots, x_n)$ to |
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a target sentence $\vec y = (y_1, \cdots, y_m)$: |
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\begin{align} |
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P_{\vec \theta}(\vec y \mid \vec x) = \prod_{t = 1}^m P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x) |
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\end{align} |
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where $\vec y_{<t}$ are all tokens in the target sentence prior to $y_t$. |
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Each local disitribution $P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x)$ is modeled as a multinomial |
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distribution over the target language's vocabulary. We compute this distribution by applying a linear transformation followed by a softmax function on the decoder's output vector |
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$\vec h_t^{dec}$: |
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\begin{align} |
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P_{\vec \theta}(y_t \mid \vec y_{<t}, \vec x) &= \mathrm{softmax}(\vec W_s \ \vec h_t^{dec}) \\ |
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\vec h_{t}^{dec} &= \tanh (\vec W_o [\tilde{\vec h}_t^{dec}; \vec c_t]) \\ |
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\vec c_t &= \mathrm{attend}(\tilde{\vec h}_{1:n}^{enc}, \tilde{\vec h}_t^{dec}) |
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\label{eqn:softmax} |
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\end{align} where |
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$[\cdot;\cdot]$ is the concatenation of two vectors, |
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$\mathrm{attend}(\cdot,\cdot)$ is an attention mechanism, |
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$\tilde{\vec h}_{1:n}^{enc}$ are all encoder's hidden vectors and |
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$\tilde{\vec h}_t^{dec}$ is the decoder's hidden vector at time step $t$. |
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We use the ``general'' global attention in~\cite{luong2015effective}. |
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During training, the encoder first encodes $\vec x$ to a continuous |
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vector $\Phi(\vec x)$, which is used as the initial hidden vector for the decoder. |
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In our paper, $\Phi(\vec x)$ simply returns the last hidden vector of the encoder. |
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The decoder performs RNN updates to produce a sequence of hidden |
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vectors: |
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\begin{equation} |
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\begin{split} |
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\tilde{\vec h}_0^{dec} &= \Phi(\vec x) \\ |
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\tilde{\vec h}_t^{dec} &= f_{\vec \theta} |
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\left(\tilde{\vec h}_{t - 1}^{dec}, \left[ \vec h_{t-1}^{dec}; e(y_t) \right] \right) |
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\end{split} |
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\label{eqn:decoder} |
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\end{equation} where $e(.)$ is a word embedding lookup function and $y_t$ is the |
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ground-truth token at time step $t$. |
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Feeding the output vector $\vec h_{t - 1}^{dec}$ to the next step is known as ``input feeding''. |
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At prediction time, the ground-truth token $y_t$ in \autoref{eqn:decoder} |
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is replaced by the model's own prediction $\hat{y}_t$: |
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\begin{equation} |
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\hat{y}_t = \arg \max_y P_{\vec \theta}(y \mid \hat{\vec y}_{<t}, \vec x) |
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\end{equation} |
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In a supervised learning framework, an NMT model is typically trained under the |
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maximum log-likelihood objective: |
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\begin{equation} |
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\begin{split} |
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\max_{\vec \theta} \mathcal{L}_{sup}(\vec \theta) &= |
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\max_{\vec \theta} \mathbb{E}_{(\vec x, \vec y) \sim D_{\textrm{tr}}} |
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\left[ \log P_{\vec \theta} \left( \vec y \mid \vec x \right) \right] |
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\end{split} |
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\end{equation} where $D_{\textrm{tr}}$ is the training set. |
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However, this learning framework is not applicable to bandit learning since |
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ground-truth translations are not available. |
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\bibliography{emnlp2017} |
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\bibliographystyle{emnlp_natbib} |
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\end{document} |
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