Related papers: Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Error Span Detecti…

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) currently exhibits biases such as producing translations that are too short and overgenerating frequent words, and shows poor robustness to copy noise in training data or domain shift. Recent work has tied…

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…

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…

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding has seen renewed interest as an alternative to traditional generation strategies. While MBR has proven effective in machine translation, where the variability of a language model's outcome space is…

High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by…

While instruction fine-tuned LLMs are effective text generators, sensitivity to prompt construction makes performance unstable and sub-optimal in practice. Relying on a single "best" prompt cannot capture all differing approaches to a…

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding achieved state-of-the-art translation performance by using COMET, a neural metric that has a high correlation with human evaluation. However, MBR decoding requires quadratic time since it computes the…

This paper explores Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding for self-improvement in machine translation (MT), particularly for domain adaptation and low-resource languages. We implement the self-improvement process by fine-tuning the model on its…

One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse. Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest…

We present a novel scheme to combine neural machine translation (NMT) with traditional statistical machine translation (SMT). Our approach borrows ideas from linearised lattice minimum Bayes-risk decoding for SMT. The NMT score is combined…

This paper proposes a novel maximum-likelihood (ML) soft-decision decoding framework for linear block codes, termed error-building decoding (EBD). The complete decoding process can be performed using only the parity-check matrix, without…

We propose a novel language-independent approach to improve the efficiency for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) by dividing the task into two subtasks: Erroneous Span Detection (ESD) and Erroneous Span Correction (ESC). ESD identifies…

Generative models of code, pretrained on large corpora of programs, have shown great success in translating natural language to code (Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022, inter alia). While these models do not explicitly…

While Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding using metrics such as COMET or MetricX has outperformed traditional decoding methods such as greedy or beam search, it introduces a challenge we refer to as metric bias. As MBR decoding aims to…

Inference scaling helps LLMs solve complex reasoning problems through extended runtime computation. On top of long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models, purely inference-time techniques such as best-of-N (BoN) sampling, majority voting, or…

State-level minimum Bayes risk (sMBR) training has become the de facto standard for sequence-level training of speech recognition acoustic models. It has an elegant formulation using the expectation semiring, and gives large improvements in…

Beam search is the most widely used decoding method for neural machine translation (NMT). In practice, the top-1 candidate with the highest log-probability among the n candidates is selected as the preferred one. However, this top-1…

In this work, we propose minimum Bayes risk (MBR) training of RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) for end-to-end speech recognition. Specifically, initialized with a RNN-T trained model, MBR training is conducted via minimizing the expected edit…

Recent research in decoding methods for Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks has shown that MAP decoding is not optimal, because model probabilities do not always align with human preferences. Stronger decoding methods, including Quality…

Minimum Bayesian Risk Decoding (MBR) emerges as a promising decoding algorithm in Neural Machine Translation. However, MBR performs poorly with label smoothing, which is surprising as label smoothing provides decent improvement with beam…