about
Insertion-Based Decoding with Automatically Inferred Generation Order (arxiv.org)
2 points by iron0013 on Feb 6, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of writing words left to right, this decoder builds a sentence by inserting each new word where it fits best, and it can learn the order. Across four tasks it matched or beat left-to-right writing, picking different orders depending on the input.

Abstract · Insertion-based Decoding with automatically Inferred Generation Order

Conventional neural autoregressive decoding commonly assumes a fixed left-to-right generation order, which may be sub-optimal. In this work, we propose a novel decoding algorithm -- InDIGO -- which supports flexible sequence generation in arbitrary orders through insertion operations. We extend Transformer, a state-of-the-art sequence generation model, to efficiently implement the proposed approach, enabling it to be trained with either a pre-defined generation order or adaptive orders obtained from beam-search. Experiments on four real-world tasks, including word order recovery, machine translation, image caption and code generation, demonstrate that our algorithm can generate sequences following arbitrary orders, while achieving competitive or even better performance compared to the conventional left-to-right generation. The generated sequences show that InDIGO adopts adaptive generation orders based on input information.

Jiatao Gu, Qi Liu, Kyunghyun Cho
arXiv:1902.01370 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Feb 4, 2019 · updated Oct 28, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Camera ready. Accepted by TACL

add comment on HN