Related papers: When to Finish? Optimal Beam Search for Neural Tex…

Beam search optimization resolves many issues in neural machine translation. However, this method lacks principled stopping criteria and does not learn how to stop during training, and the model naturally prefers the longer hypotheses…

Beam search is widely used in neural machine translation, and usually improves translation quality compared to greedy search. It has been widely observed that, however, beam sizes larger than 5 hurt translation quality. We explain why this…

The basic concept in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is to train a large Neural Network that maximizes the translation performance on a given parallel corpus. NMT is then using a simple left-to-right beam-search decoder to generate new…

The performance of natural language generation systems has improved substantially with modern neural networks. At test time they typically employ beam search to avoid locally optimal but globally suboptimal predictions. However, due to…

Quite surprisingly, exact maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding of neural language generators frequently leads to low-quality results. Rather, most state-of-the-art results on language generation tasks are attained using beam search despite…

Decoding for many NLP tasks requires an effective heuristic algorithm for approximating exact search since the problem of searching the full output space is often intractable, or impractical in many settings. The default algorithm for this…

Text generation with beam search has proven successful in a wide range of applications. We point out that, though largely overlooked in the literature, the commonly-used implementation of beam decoding (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers and…

Wider beam search should improve LLM reasoning, but when should you stop widening? Prior work on beam width selection has focused on inference efficiency \citep{qin2025dsbd, freitag2017beam}, without analyzing whether wider search can…

Beam search and exhaustive search are two extreme ends of text decoding algorithms with respect to the search depth. Beam search is limited in both search width and depth, whereas exhaustive search is a global search that has no such…

Neural machine translation models rely on the beam search algorithm for decoding. In practice, we found that the quality of hypotheses in the search space is negatively affected owing to the fixed beam size. To mitigate this problem, we…

Beam search is a go-to strategy for decoding neural sequence models. The algorithm can naturally be viewed as a subset optimization problem, albeit one where the corresponding set function does not reflect interactions between candidates.…

Beam search is a desirable choice of test-time decoding algorithm for neural sequence models because it potentially avoids search errors made by simpler greedy methods. However, typical cross entropy training procedures for these models do…

Beam search is an effective and widely used decoding algorithm in many sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) text generation tasks. However, in open-ended text generation, beam search is often found to produce repetitive and generic texts,…

Beam search is universally used in full-sentence translation but its application to simultaneous translation remains non-trivial, where output words are committed on the fly. In particular, the recently proposed wait-k policy (Ma et al.,…

We study two problems in neural machine translation (NMT). First, in beam search, whereas a wider beam should in principle help translation, it often hurts NMT. Second, NMT has a tendency to produce translations that are too short. Here, we…

Retrieving relevant targets from an extremely large target set under computational limits is a common challenge for information retrieval and recommendation systems. Tree models, which formulate targets as leaves of a tree with trainable…

We report on search errors and model errors in neural machine translation (NMT). We present an exact inference procedure for neural sequence models based on a combination of beam search and depth-first search. We use our exact search to…

As one popular modeling approach for end-to-end speech recognition, attention-based encoder-decoder models are known to suffer the length bias and corresponding beam problem. Different approaches have been applied in simple beam search to…

Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known…

Beam search is widely used for approximate decoding in structured prediction problems. Models often use a beam at test time but ignore its existence at train time, and therefore do not explicitly learn how to use the beam. We develop an…