Papers by Esteban Garces Arias
Decoding Decoded: Understanding Hyperparameter Effects in Open-Ended Text Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative large language models generate a high-dimensional probability distribution over all tokens in their vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive sensitivity analyses to determine how hyperparameter choices shape the outputs of generative large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods influence the distribution of diversity and coherence metrics in human-written text, but the optimal configurations vary across models and tasks. |
GUARD: Glocal Uncertainty-Aware Robust Decoding for Effective and Efficient Open-Ended Text Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuanhao Ding, Esteban Garces Arias, Meimingwei Li, Julian Rodemann, Matthias Aßenmacher, Danlu Chen, Gaojuan Fan, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
| Challenge: | GUARD is a self-adaptive decoding method that balances coherence with diversity in open-ended text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-adaptive decoding method that balances coherence and diversity . they combine global entropy estimates with local entropic deviations to integrate uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | GUARD achieves a good balance between diversity and coherence while exhibiting significant improvements in generation speed. |
Digitizing Nepal’s Written Heritage: A Comprehensive HTR Pipeline for Old Nepali Manuscripts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using a line-level transcription approach, we explore encoder-decoder architectures and data-centric techniques to improve recognition accuracy for Old Nepali manuscripts. |
| Approach: | They propose a line-level transcription approach and explore encoder-decoder architectures and data-centric techniques to improve recognition accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 4.9% error rate and is highly reliable. |
Self-Reinforcing Controllable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data via Bayesian Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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Chongsheng Zhang, Hao Wang, Zelong Yu, Esteban Garces Arias, Julian Rodemann, Zhanshuo Zhang, Qilong Li, Gaojuan Fan, Krikamol Muandet, Christian Heumann
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesis of relational/structured tabular data lack effective feedback mechanism to optimize quality of generated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a relational data generator with dynamic guidance framework that uses chain-of-thought steps to generate tabular data for enhancing downstream imbalanced classification performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in both data fidelity and downstream imbalanced classification performance on real and synthetic datasets. |
Adaptive Contrastive Search: Uncertainty-Guided Decoding for Open-Ended Text Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decode text to the most probable sequence have been proposed to address these challenges by improving coherence, diversity, and resemblance to human-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel decoding strategy that extends contrastive search by incorporating an adaptive degeneration penalty informed by the model’s estimated uncertainty at each generation step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves creativity and coherence while maintaining coherency across model architectures, languages, and datasets. |
Min-k Sampling: Decoupling Truncation from Temperature Scaling via Relative Logit Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias Aßenmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding large language models have extreme sensitivity to temperature parameter T. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic truncation strategy that analyzes the local shape of the logit distribution to identify "semantic cliffs" they show that Min-k consistently improves text quality even under extreme temperature settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strict temperature invariance and low sensitivity to hyperparameter choices. |
Automatic Transcription of Handwritten Old Occitan Language (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handwritten text recognition have shown promising results, but low-resource languages often lack resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an HTR approach that leverages the Transformer architecture for recognizing handwritten Old Occitan language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art models for Old Occitan HTR, including open-source Transformer-based models and commercial applications like Google Cloud Vision. |