English

Calibration of Encoder Decoder Models for Neural Machine Translation

Machine Learning 2019-03-06 v1 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

We study the calibration of several state of the art neural machine translation(NMT) systems built on attention-based encoder-decoder models. For structured outputs like in NMT, calibration is important not just for reliable confidence with predictions, but also for proper functioning of beam-search inference. We show that most modern NMT models are surprisingly miscalibrated even when conditioned on the true previous tokens. Our investigation leads to two main reasons -- severe miscalibration of EOS (end of sequence marker) and suppression of attention uncertainty. We design recalibration methods based on these signals and demonstrate improved accuracy, better sequence-level calibration, and more intuitive results from beam-search.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.00802,
  title  = {Calibration of Encoder Decoder Models for Neural Machine Translation},
  author = {Aviral Kumar and Sunita Sarawagi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.00802},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

12 Pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:56:29.811Z