October 26, 2020
The Transformer model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many sequence modeling tasks. However, how to leverage model capacity with large or variable depths is still an open challenge. We present a probabilistic framework to automatically learn which layer(s) to use by learning the posterior distributions of layer selection. As an extension of this framework, we propose a novel method to train one shared Transformer network for multilingual machine translation with different layer selection posteriors for each language pair. The proposed method alleviates the vanishing gradient issue and enables stable training of deep Transformers (e.g. 100 layers). We evaluate on WMT English-German machine translation and masked language modeling tasks, where our method outperforms existing approaches for training deeper Transformers. Experiments on multilingual machine translation demonstrate that this approach can effectively leverage increased model capacity and bring universal improvement for both many-to-one and one-to-many translation with diverse language pairs.
Publisher
NeurIPS
April 16, 2026
Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicolas Baldwin, Edan Toledo, Rishi Hazra, Michael Kuchnik, Bassel Al Omari, Thomas Simon Foster, Anton Protopopov, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Michael Shvartsman, Alisia Lupidi, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Parth Pathak, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Hela Momand, Derek Dunfield, Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Carole-Jean Wu, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, Martin Josifoski
April 16, 2026
March 17, 2026
Omnilingual MT Team, Belen Alastruey, Niyati Bafna, Andrea Caciolai, Kevin Heffernan, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Christophe Ropers, Eduardo Sánchez, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Ioannis Tsiamas, Chierh CHENG, Joe Chuang, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Mark Duppenthaler, Nate Ekberg, Cynthia Gao, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, João Maria Janeiro, Jean Maillard, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Edan Toledo, Arina Turkatenko, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Rashel Moritz, Alexandre Mourachko, Surya Parimi, Mary Williamson, Shireen Yates, David Dale, Marta R. Costa-jussa
March 17, 2026
March 17, 2026
Omnilingual SONAR Team, João Maria Janeiro, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Ioannis Tsiamas, Yen Meng, Vivek Iyer, Guillem Ramirez, Loic Barrault, Belen Alastruey, Yu-An Chung, Marta R. Costa-jussa, David Dale, Kevin Heffernan, Jaehyeong Jo, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Holger Schwenk, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne
March 17, 2026
February 27, 2026
Yifu Qiu, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk
February 27, 2026

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