Related papers: If beam search is the answer, what was the questio…
It has been widely observed that exact or approximate MAP (mode-seeking) decoding from natural language generation (NLG) models consistently leads to degenerate outputs (Holtzman et al., 2019; Stahlberg and Byrne, 2019). Prior work has…
In NMT we search for the mode of the model distribution to form predictions. The mode and other high-probability translations found by beam search have been shown to often be inadequate in a number of ways. This prevents improving…
We combine beam search with the probabilistic pruning technique of nucleus sampling to create two deterministic nucleus search algorithms for natural language generation. The first algorithm, p-exact search, locally prunes the next-token…
Neural text generation is a key tool in natural language applications, but it is well known there are major problems at its core. In particular, standard likelihood training and decoding leads to dull and repetitive outputs. While some…
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…
In neural dialogue modeling, a neural network is trained to predict the next utterance, and at inference time, an approximate decoding algorithm is used to generate next utterances given previous ones. While this autoregressive framework…
The end-to-end nature of neural machine translation (NMT) removes many ways of manually guiding the translation process that were available in older paradigms. Recent work, however, has introduced a new capability: lexically constrained or…
Despite improvements in performances on different natural language generation tasks, deep neural models are prone to hallucinating facts that are incorrect or nonexistent. Different hypotheses are proposed and examined separately for…
MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables in a Bayesian network given some evidence. Unlike computing posterior probabilities, or MPE (a special case of MAP), the time and space complexity of…
We present Grid Beam Search (GBS), an algorithm which extends beam search to allow the inclusion of pre-specified lexical constraints. The algorithm can be used with any model that generates a sequence $ \mathbf{\hat{y}} = \{y_{0}\ldots…
One popular approach for blind deconvolution is to formulate a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem with sparsity priors on the gradients of the latent image, and then alternatingly estimate the blur kernel and the latent image. While several…
Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding optimizes output selection by maximizing the expected utility value of an underlying human distribution. While prior work has shown the effectiveness of MBR decoding through empirical evaluation, few…
Despite strong performance on a variety of tasks, neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood have been shown to exhibit issues such as length bias and degenerate repetition. We study the related issue of receiving…
Sequence labeling is a core task in text understanding for IE/IR systems. Text generation models have increasingly become the go-to solution for such tasks (e.g., entity extraction and dialog slot filling). While most research has focused…
In this paper, we present and prove some consistency results about the performance of classification models using a subset of features. In addition, we propose to use beam search to perform feature selection, which can be viewed as a…
Conditional neural text generation models generate high-quality outputs, but often concentrate around a mode when what we really want is a diverse set of options. We present a search algorithm to construct lattices encoding a massive number…
Generative molecular design has moved from proof-of-concept to real-world applicability, as marked by the surge in very recent papers reporting experimental validation. Key challenges in explainability and sample efficiency present…
Multi-hop question answering (QA) involves finding multiple relevant passages and step-by-step reasoning to answer complex questions, indicating a retrieve-and-read paradigm. However, previous retrievers were customized for two-hop…
In many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the same input (e.g. source sentence) can have multiple possible outputs (e.g. translations). To analyze how this ambiguity (also known as intrinsic uncertainty) shapes the distribution…
We propose a method for natural language generation, choosing the most representative output rather than the most likely output. By viewing the language generation process from the voting theory perspective, we define representativeness…