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Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
Autoregressive language models are trained by minimizing the cross-entropy of the model distribution Q relative to the data distribution P -- that is, minimizing the forward cross-entropy, which is equivalent to maximum likelihood…
Conditional text generation often requires lexical constraints, i.e., which words should or shouldn't be included in the output text. While the dominant recipe for conditional text generation has been large-scale pretrained language models…
Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-k, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting selection to high-probability regions. Human language production operates…
Current state-of-the-art text generators build on powerful language models such as GPT-2, achieving impressive performance. However, to avoid degenerate text, they require sampling from a modified softmax, via temperature parameters or…
Controllable text generation systems often leverage control codes to direct various properties of the output like style and length. Inspired by recent work on causal inference for NLP, this paper reveals a previously overlooked flaw in…
Deep learning methods have recently achieved great empirical success on machine translation, dialogue response generation, summarization, and other text generation tasks. At a high level, the technique has been to train end-to-end neural…
Top-$k$ decoding is a widely used method for sampling from LLMs: at each token, only the largest $k$ next-token-probabilities are kept, and the next token is sampled after re-normalizing them to sum to unity. Top-$k$ and other sampling…
Despite their ubiquity in language generation, it remains unknown why truncation sampling heuristics like nucleus sampling are so effective. We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of the truncation sampling by proving…
While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms…
As large-scale language model pretraining pushes the state-of-the-art in text generation, recent work has turned to controlling attributes of the text such models generate. While modifying the pretrained models via fine-tuning remains the…
Self-training (ST) has come to fruition in language understanding tasks by producing pseudo labels, which reduces the labeling bottleneck of language model fine-tuning. Nevertheless, in facilitating semi-supervised controllable language…
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieved external knowledge has proven effective for improving the factual accuracy of generated responses. Despite their success, retrieval-augmented LLMs still face the distractibility issue,…
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In…
Decoding from the output distributions of large language models to produce high-quality text is a complex challenge in language modeling. Various approaches, such as beam search, sampling with temperature, $k-$sampling, nucleus…
Large language models (LM) based on Transformers allow to generate plausible long texts. In this paper, we explore how this generation can be further controlled at decoding time to satisfy certain constraints (e.g. being non-toxic,…
Current language models decode text token by token according to probabilistic distribution, and determining the appropriate candidates for the next token is crucial to ensure generation quality. This study introduces adaptive decoding, a…
Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, yet existing decoding strategies either explore blindly (random sampling) or redundantly (independent multi-sampling). We propose Entropy-Tree, a tree-based decoding method that…
Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…
Pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models such as CLIP have demonstrated their excellent performance across numerous downstream tasks. A recent method, Context Optimization (CoOp), further improves the performance of VL models on downstream…