Contrastive Preference Learning for Neural Machine Translation

There exists a discrepancy between the token-level objective during training and the overall sequence-level quality that is expected from the model. This discrepancy leads to issues like exposure bias. To align the model with human expectations, sequence-level objectives are often used to fine-tune pre-trained models. In this paper, we introduce a contrastive preference model that enhances the traditional Plackett-Luce model by incorporating an indicator function. Building upon this novel preference model, we propose Contrastive Preference Learning (CPL), which uses offline samples with list-wise preferences to fine-tune a pre-trained model in Neural Machine Translation. Our experiments, conducted on three language pairs, demonstrate that CPL outperforms not only the vanilla Transformer model but also other token-level and sequence-level baselines. Furthermore, the ablation study highlights the essential role of the proposed indicator function in achieving this improvement. © 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.