Model combination\ensembling:
Average ensembling is practical - but naive.
Combine considering each network's strengths, much better!
Moreover, let's make the networks diverse so they will have different strengths.
The basic idea is quite simple:
Given some models, why would we want the average? We want to rely on each one(or group) when it is more likely to be the correct one.
This was actually introduced in our previous work (as admitted by the authors) in aclanthology.org/W19-4414.pdf
The paper's addition: 1. Given a set of black-box models we may train at least one of them to be different from the rest with RL. 2. we can use more sophisticated NNs to combine the outputs 3. we can ignore domain knowledge for the combination (I am not sure this is a bonus)
Results are very strong. Especially nice is that they show that the diversity training indeed helps
My criticism:
The comparisons are always to SoTA, this is meaningless. The authors propose different parts (the diversity, the combination and the combined models).
It is unclear whether ensembling after the diversity would be preferable over their's or not.
Similarly, they compare to Kantor et al., but Kantor provided a combination method, why not compare on the same models, or combine with Kantor's method the models after the diversity training?
To conclude, I really like the direction, and ensembling is a very practical tool that for some reason was not improved in a long time.
Ever since MAEGE (aclanthology.org/P18-1127/) I have a soft spot for evaluation of evaluation = EoE (especially when they are automatic, but without is still ok).
Capture formality - XLM-R with regression not classification
Preservation - with chrf not BLEU
Fluency - XLM-R but there is room for improvement
System Ranking - XLM-R and chrf
Crosslingual Transfer - rely on zero shot not machine translation