Research
NLP
Levenshtein Transformer
December 8, 2019
Abstract
Modern neural sequence generation models are built to either generate tokens step-by-step from scratch or (iteratively) modify a sequence of tokens bounded by a fixed length. In this work, we develop Levenshtein Transformer, a new partially autoregressive model devised for more flexible and amenable sequence generation. Unlike previous approaches, the basic operations of our model are insertion and deletion. The combination of them facilitates not only generation but also sequence refinement allowing dynamic length changes. We also propose a set of new training techniques dedicated at them, effectively exploiting one as the other’s learning signal thanks to their complementary nature. Experiments applying the proposed model achieve comparable or even better performance with much-improved efficiency on both generation (e.g. machine translation, text summarization) and refinement tasks (e.g. automatic post-editing). We further confirm the flexibility of our model by showing a Levenshtein Transformer trained by machine translation can straightforwardly be used for automatic post-editing.
AUTHORS
Research Topics
Related Publications
June 05, 2026
Conversational AI
Ranking & Recommendations
Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Agentic Retrieval
Anshumali Shrivastava, Jason Chen, Qi Ma, Zeyu Yang
June 05, 2026
May 19, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data
Alvin W. M. Tan, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Michael C. Frank, Angel Villar Corrales, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Dongyan Lin, Emmanuel Dupoux, Jiayi Shen, Juan Pino, Mahi Luthra, Martin Gleize, Phillip Rust, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Surya Parimi, Tom Fizycki, Vanessa Stark, Yosuke Higuchi, Youssef Benchekroun
May 19, 2026
May 17, 2026
Conversational AI
GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains
Alexandre Rezende, Rohit Patel, Steven McClain
May 17, 2026
May 12, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
October 31, 2019
NLP
Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
March 14, 2019
NLP
On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research
Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin
March 14, 2019
January 13, 2020
NLP
Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research
Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert
January 13, 2020
April 30, 2018
NLP
Computer Vision
Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research
Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston
April 30, 2018
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026