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Text Diffusion with Reinforced Conditioning (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Mar 1, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A text generator that builds a whole sentence at once by repeatedly cleaning up noisy word guesses, with two fixes: keeping its own earlier guesses useful during training and matching the noise schedule to sampling. It writes as well as the usual one-word-at-a-time models.

Abstract

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capability in generating high-quality images, videos, and audio. Due to their adaptiveness in iterative refinement, they provide a strong potential for achieving better non-autoregressive sequence generation. However, existing text diffusion models still fall short in their performance due to a challenge in handling the discreteness of language. This paper thoroughly analyzes text diffusion models and uncovers two significant limitations: degradation of self-conditioning during training and misalignment between training and sampling. Motivated by our findings, we propose a novel Text Diffusion model called TREC, which mitigates the degradation with Reinforced Conditioning and the misalignment by Time-Aware Variance Scaling. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of TREC against autoregressive, non-autoregressive, and diffusion baselines. Moreover, qualitative analysis shows its advanced ability to fully utilize the diffusion process in refining samples.

Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
arXiv:2402.14843 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Feb 19, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 3 figures

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