  Despite impressive progress in high-resource settings, Neural Machine
Translation (NMT) still struggles in low-resource and out-of-domain scenarios,
often failing to match the quality of phrase-based translation. We propose a
novel technique that combines back-translation and multilingual NMT to improve
performance in these difficult cases. Our technique trains a single model for
both directions of a language pair, allowing us to back-translate source or
target monolingual data without requiring an auxiliary model. We then continue
training on the augmented parallel data, enabling a cycle of improvement for a
single model that can incorporate any source, target, or parallel data to
improve both translation directions. As a byproduct, these models can reduce
training and deployment costs significantly compared to uni-directional models.
Extensive experiments show that our technique outperforms standard
back-translation in low-resource scenarios, improves quality on cross-domain
tasks, and effectively reduces costs across the board.

Computation and Language