Distributed Equivalent Substitution Training for Large-Scale Recommender Systems

We present Distributed Equivalent Substitution (DES) training, a novel distributed training framework for recommender systems with large-scale dynamic sparse features. Our framework achieves faster convergence with less communication overhead and better computing resource utilization. DES strategy splits a weights-rich operator into sub-operators with co-located weights and aggregates partial results with much smaller communication cost to form a computationally equivalent substitution to the original operator. We show that for different types of models that recommender systems use, we can always find computational equivalent substitutions and splitting strategies for their weights-rich operators with theoretical communication load reduced ranging from 72.26% to 99.77%. We also present an implementation of DES that outperforms state-of-the-art recommender systems. Experiments show that our framework achieves up to 83% communication savings compared to other recommender systems, and can bring up to 4.5x improvement on throughput for deep models.

Neural Machine Translation with Key-Value Memory-Augmented Attention

Although attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, it still suffers from issues of repeating and dropping translations. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel key-value memory-augmented attention model for NMT, called KVMEMATT. Specifically, we maintain a timely updated keymemory to keep track of attention history and a fixed value-memory to store the representation of source sentence throughout the whole translation process. Via nontrivial transformations and iterative interactions between the two memories, the decoder focuses on more appropriate source word(s) for predicting the next target word at each decoding step, therefore can improve the adequacy of translations. Experimental results on Chinese=>English and WMT17 German<=>English translation tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.

Towards Robust Neural Machine Translation

Small perturbations in the input can severely distort intermediate representations and thus impact translation quality of neural machine translation (NMT) models. In this paper, we propose to improve the robustness of NMT models with adversarial stability training. The basic idea is to make both the encoder and decoder in NMT models robust against input perturbations by enabling them to behave similarly for the original input and its perturbed counterpart. Experimental results on Chinese-English, English-German and English-French translation tasks show that our approaches can not only achieve significant improvements over strong NMT systems but also improve the robustness of NMT models.