Fast Interleaved Bidirectional Sequence Generation
Journal: Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich)
Year: 2020

Independence assumptions during sequence generation can speed up inference, but parallel generation of highly inter-dependent tokens comes at a cost in quality. Instead of assuming independence between neighbouring tokens (semi-autoregressive decoding, SA), we take inspiration from bidirectional sequence generation and introduce a decoder that generates target words from the left-to-right and right-to-left directions simultaneously. We show that we can easily convert a standard architecture for