Scaling Laws for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Priberam Labs

Instituto Superior Técnico, Anfiteatro PA2

Abstract:In this talk, we provide a large-scale empirical study of the scaling properties of multilingual neural machine translation models. We examine how increases in the model size affect the model performance and investigate the role of the training mixture composition on the scaling behavior. We find that changing the weightings of the individual language pairs in the training mixture only affect the multiplicative factor of the scaling law. In particular, we observe that multilingual models trained using different mixing rates all exhibit the same scaling exponent. Through a novel joint scaling law formulation, we compute the effective number of parameters allocated to each language pair and examine the role of language similarity in the scaling behavior of our models. We find little evidence that language similarity has any impact. In contrast, the direction of the multilinguality plays a significant role, with models translating from multiple languages into English having a larger number of effective parameters per task than their reversed counterparts. Finally, we leverage our observations to predict the performance of multilingual models trained with any language weighting at any scale, significantly reducing efforts required for language balancing in large multilingual models. Our findings apply to both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets and to multiple evaluation metrics, such as ChrF and BLEURT.Bio:Patrick Fernandes is a dual-degree PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University and Instituto Superior Técnico, supervised by Graham Neubig and André Martins. He is also a part-time Student Researcher at Google Brain. His main research interests revolve around understanding how neural networks learn, how they use the information they are provided to make decisions, and how to improve this decision process, with a special emphasis on Machine Translation. In a past life, he also worked with Graph Neural Networks for source code understanding.<a href="https://www.priberam.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.priberam.com</a>

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Scaling Laws for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

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Scaling Laws for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

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