  Mixture of Softmaxes (MoS) has been shown to be effective at addressing the
expressiveness limitation of Softmax-based models. Despite the known advantage,
MoS is practically sealed by its large consumption of memory and computational
time due to the need of computing multiple Softmaxes. In this work, we set out
to unleash the power of MoS in practical applications by investigating improved
word coding schemes, which could effectively reduce the vocabulary size and
hence relieve the memory and computation burden. We show both BPE and our
proposed Hybrid-LightRNN lead to improved encoding mechanisms that can halve
the time and memory consumption of MoS without performance losses. With MoS, we
achieve an improvement of 1.5 BLEU scores on IWSLT 2014 German-to-English
corpus and an improvement of 0.76 CIDEr score on image captioning. Moreover, on
the larger WMT 2014 machine translation dataset, our MoS-boosted Transformer
yields 29.5 BLEU score for English-to-German and 42.1 BLEU score for
English-to-French, outperforming the single-Softmax Transformer by 0.8 and 0.4
BLEU scores respectively and achieving the state-of-the-art result on WMT 2014
English-to-German task.

Computation and Language