English

Case-Based Decision-Theoretic Decoding with Quality Memories

Computation and Language 2025-09-17 v1

Abstract

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation, which selects the hypothesis that maximizes the expected utility and robustly generates higher-quality texts than maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding. However, it depends on sample texts drawn from the text generation model; thus, it is difficult to find a hypothesis that correctly captures the knowledge or information of out-of-domain. To tackle this issue, we propose case-based decision-theoretic (CBDT) decoding, another method to estimate the expected utility using examples of domain data. CBDT decoding not only generates higher-quality texts than MAP decoding, but also the combination of MBR and CBDT decoding outperformed MBR decoding in seven domain De--En and Ja\leftrightarrowEn translation tasks and image captioning tasks on MSCOCO and nocaps datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.12677,
  title  = {Case-Based Decision-Theoretic Decoding with Quality Memories},
  author = {Hiroyuki Deguchi and Masaaki Nagata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12677},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at EMNLP2025 main

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:38:24.646Z