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Neural sequence models are widely used to model time-series data. Equally ubiquitous is the usage of beam search (BS) as an approximate inference algorithm to decode output sequences from these models. BS explores the search space in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Ashwin K Vijayakumar , Michael Cogswell , Ramprasath R. Selvaraju , Qing Sun , Stefan Lee , David Crandall , Dhruv Batra

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Yilin Yang , Liang Huang , Mingbo Ma

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images from text prompts, they struggle with visual consistency when generating image sequences. Existing methods generate each image independently, leading to disjointed narratives -…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Guilherme Fernandes , Vasco Ramos , Regev Cohen , Idan Szpektor , João Magalhães

Beam search is a widely used approximate search strategy for neural network decoders, and it generally outperforms simple greedy decoding on tasks like machine translation. However, this improvement comes at substantial computational cost.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-29 Yun Chen , Victor O. K. Li , Kyunghyun Cho , Samuel R. Bowman

Decoding methods for large language models often trade-off between diversity of outputs and parallelism of computation. Methods such as beam search and Gumbel top-k sampling can guarantee a different output for each element of the beam, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Luke Vilnis , Yury Zemlyanskiy , Patrick Murray , Alexandre Passos , Sumit Sanghai

We develop the first approximate inference algorithm for 1-Best (and M-Best) decoding in bidirectional neural sequence models by extending Beam Search (BS) to reason about both forward and backward time dependencies. Beam Search (BS) is a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Qing Sun , Stefan Lee , Dhruv Batra

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…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-24 Wei Zhou , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

Generating goal-oriented questions in Visual Dialogue tasks is a challenging and long-standing problem. State-Of-The-Art systems are shown to generate questions that, although grammatically correct, often lack an effective strategy and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Alberto Testoni , Raffaella Bernardi

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Raphael Shu , Hideki Nakayama

Label smoothing is ubiquitously applied in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) training. While label smoothing offers a desired regularization effect during model training, in this paper we demonstrate that it nevertheless introduces length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Bowen Liang , Pidong Wang , Yuan Cao

Beam search with masked language models (MLMs) is challenging in part because joint probability distributions over sequences are not readily available, unlike for autoregressive models. However, estimating such distributions has important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Creston Brooks , Robert Calef , Charlie Cowen-Breen , Anna Sappington

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-26 Mingbo Ma , Renjie Zheng , Liang Huang

Compositional explanations are a family of methods that aim to describe the spatial alignment between neurons' receptive field activations and concepts through logical rules, typically computed via a search over all possible concept…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Biagio La Rosa , Leilani H. Gilpin

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Felix Stahlberg , Bill Byrne

Beam search is a popular satisficing approach to heuristic search problems that allows one to trade increased computation time for lower solution cost by increasing the beam width parameter. We make two contributions to the study of beam…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Sofia Lemons , Carlos Linares López , Robert C. Holte , Wheeler Ruml

In Neural Machine Translation, it is typically assumed that the sentence with the highest estimated probability should also be the translation with the highest quality as measured by humans. In this work, we question this assumption and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Markus Freitag , David Grangier , Qijun Tan , Bowen Liang

Neural machine translation inference procedures like beam search generate the most likely output under the model. This can exacerbate any demographic biases exhibited by the model. We focus on gender bias resulting from systematic errors in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Danielle Saunders , Rosie Sallis , Bill Byrne

We adapt the well-known beam-search algorithm for machine translation to operate in a cascaded real-time speech translation system. This proved to be more complex than initially anticipated, due to four key challenges: (1) real-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Rastislav Rabatin , Frank Seide , Ernie Chang

We address the challenge of generating fair and unbiased image retrieval results given neutral textual queries (with no explicit gender or race connotations), while maintaining the utility (performance) of the underlying vision-language…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Fanjie Kong , Shuai Yuan , Weituo Hao , Ricardo Henao

Image captioning is an ambiguous problem, with many suitable captions for an image. To address ambiguity, beam search is the de facto method for sampling multiple captions. However, beam search is computationally expensive and known to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Aditya Deshpande , Jyoti Aneja , Liwei Wang , Alexander Schwing , D. A. Forsyth