SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 1902.08295

Lingvo: a Modular and Scalable Framework for Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling

Abstract

Lingvo is a Tensorflow framework offering a complete solution for collaborative deep learning research, with a particular focus towards sequence-to-sequence models. Lingvo models are composed of modular building blocks that are flexible and easily extensible, and experiment configurations are centralized and highly customizable. Distributed training and quantized inference are supported directly within the framework, and it contains existing implementations of a large number of utilities, helper functions, and the newest research ideas. Lingvo has been used in collaboration by dozens of researchers in more than 20 papers over the last two years. This document outlines the underlying design of Lingvo and serves as an introduction to the various pieces of the framework, while also offering examples of advanced features that showcase the capabilities of the framework.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Jonathan Shen, Patrick Nguyen, Yonghui Wu, Zhifeng Chen, Mia X. Chen, Ye Jia, Anjuli Kannan, Tara Sainath, Yuan Cao, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Yanzhang He, Jan Chorowski, Smit Hinsu, Stella Laurenzo, James Qin, Orhan Firat, Wolfgang Macherey, Suyog Gupta, Ankur Bapna, Shuyuan Zhang, Ruoming Pang, Ron J. Weiss, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Qiao Liang, Benoit Jacob, Bowen Liang, HyoukJoong Lee, Ciprian Chelba, Sébastien Jean, Bo Li, Melvin Johnson, Rohan Anil, Rajat Tibrewal, Xiaobing Liu, Akiko Eriguchi, Navdeep Jaitly, Naveen Ari, Colin Cherry, Parisa Haghani, Otavio Good, Youlong Cheng, Raziel Alvarez, Isaac Caswell, Wei-Ning Hsu, Zongheng Yang, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Ekaterina Gonina, Katrin Tomanek, Ben Vanik, Zelin Wu, Llion Jones, Mike Schuster, Yanping Huang, Dehao Chen, Kazuki Irie, George Foster, John Richardson, Klaus Macherey, Antoine Bruguier, Heiga Zen, Colin Raffel, Shankar Kumar, Kanishka Rao, David Rybach, Matthew Murray, Vijayaditya Peddinti, Maxim Krikun, Michiel A. U. Bacchiani, Thomas B. Jablin, Rob Suderman, Ian Williams, Benjamin Lee, Deepti Bhatia, Justin Carlson, Semih Yavuz, Yu Zhang, Ian McGraw, Max Galkin, Qi Ge, Golan Pundak, Chad Whipkey, Todd Wang, Uri Alon, Dmitry Lepikhin, Ye Tian, Sara Sabour, William Chan, Shubham Toshniwal, Baohua Liao, Michael Nirschl, Pat Rondon. 2019-02-21. Lingvo: a Modular and Scalable Framework for Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08295

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence

Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.

cs.LG

Measuring the Value of World-Model Updates: A Counterfactual Utility Protocol for Continual Adaptation

Continual world models must decide whether new data justify changing the model. Fixed replay schedules and prediction-error triggers specify when to update, but neither reveals the value of an individual update: one deployment run cannot show how the same model would have performed at that moment had it held its parameters. We introduce the fork ledger, which branches a deployment stream at pre-registered decision points into matched update and hold continuations under common random numbers. It evaluates both continuations on the same episodes and records $\Delta R = R_{\mathrm{update}} - R_{\mathrm{hold}}$. Always applying one fixed update mechanism lowers return on all three simulated control tasks: CartPole ($-144.0$; checkpoint-bootstrap $95\%$ CI $[-185.4,-116.1]$, against a converged return near $650$), Walker ($-82.8$; $[-101.1,-61.7]$) and Cheetah ($-18.6$; $[-29.0,-6.6]$). Divergence is an outcome of applying the update, so the estimand counts every attempted fork; restricted to the $693$ of $720$ that did not collapse, CartPole and Walker are unchanged in sign ($-113.4$ and $-82.1$) and Cheetah becomes unresolved ($-3.9$; $[-17.5,+13.0]$). The task is the unit of inference: each contributes $240$ attempted forks over five pretrained checkpoints crossed with two drift directions. The ledger makes counterfactual utility observable for a fixed mechanism, allowing triggers to be judged by the updates they select rather than by surprise detection alone.

cs.LG

When More Is Not Better: Component Anti-Synergy in a P300 Speller

P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers can provide hands-free communication for people with severe motor impairments. Modern pipelines combine multiple individually promising components, often assuming that 'more-is-better'. We tested this assumption using a four-component full-factorial experiment varying the inclusion of Euclidean Alignment (EA), xDAWN spatial filtering, subject calibration, and language model priors on a public P300 dataset. Performance was evaluated using accuracy, repetitions, and information transfer rate (ITR) with mixed-effects models. Results show that the value of components is conditional rather than additive. Calibration was the strongest singular contributor, while EA compensated for its absence in zero-calibration settings. Adding independently useful components could also reduce performance, revealing component anti-synergy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, LM support was not universally beneficial: its effect depends strongly on the strength of the underlying EEG pipeline, while results from a larger LM showed a similar pattern. Together, these findings challenge maximal 'all-on' pipeline design and highlight the value of selecting spatial and language-support components according to the quality of available EEG evidence.

cs.LG