Papers with MLE
Reference Free Domain Adaptation for Translation of Noisy Questions with Question Specific Rewards (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Baban Gain, Ramakrishna Appicharla, Soumya Chennabasavaraj, Nikesh Garera, Asif Ekbal, Muthusamy Chelliah
| Challenge: | Creating a synthetic parallel corpus from noisy data is also difficult due to its noisy nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a training methodology that fine-tunes the NMT system only using source-side data to balance adequacy and fluency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the MLE-based fine-tuning approach by achieving a 1.9 BLEU improvement. |
Learning to Ideate for Machine Learning Engineering Agents (2026.eacl-short)
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Yunxiang Zhang, Kang Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kiran Ramnath, Yun Zhou, Sangmin Woo, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing machine learning engineering (MLE) agents struggle to iteratively optimize their implemented algorithms for effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that separates ideation from implementation that allows an implementation agent to request strategic help from a dedicated Ideator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms implementation-only agent baselines on MLE-Bench and can be trained with reinforcement learning to generate more effective ideas. |
Generating Reasonable and Diversified Story Ending Using Sequence to Sequence Model with Adversarial Training (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Story generation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence (AI) . previous work focused on learning statistical models of event sequences from large-scale text corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial training to generate reasonable story endings . their model includes a generator that defines the policy of generating a story ending . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on the task of Story Cloze Test with an accuracy of 62.6% compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. |
Faithful or Extractive? On Mitigating the Faithfulness-Abstractiveness Trade-off in Abstractive Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization systems still suffer from faithfulness errors, authors say . prior work has proposed models that improve faithfulness, but it is unclear whether this improvement comes from an increased level of extractiveness of the outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithfulness-abstractiveness trade-off curve that serves as a control . they also learn a selector to identify the most faithful and abstractive summary for a given document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher faithfulness scores while being abstractive than the baseline system on two datasets. |
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled Refusal Training (2025.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Pinjia He, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit a level of intelligence that is both impressive and everevolving, but their ability to refuse generating unsafe content is a double-edged sword. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to tackle a refusal position bias within safety tuning data that compromises the models’ ability to appropriately refuse generating unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves model safety without compromising performance and surpasses baseline methods in defending against attacks. |
Generating Temporally-ordered Event Sequences via Event Optimal Transport (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal event ordering and event infilling ignore the global semantics of events, and the model adopts a word-level objective to model events in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event ordering and event infilling task using a model that uses maximum likelihood estimation to model events in texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on all evaluation datasets. |
SemRegex: A Semantics-Based Approach for Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate programs from natural language do not address program aliasing . semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-based approach to generate regular expressions from natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three public datasets. |
Adaptive Bridge between Training and Inference for Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model can achieve a significant improvement in terms of metric-based evaluation and human evaluation compared with the state-of-the-art exposure bias approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive switching mechanism which automatically transits between ground-truth learning and generated learning regarding the word-level matching score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English reddit datasets compared with state-of-the-art models on the word-level matching score. |
Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods. |
Clickbait? Sensational Headline Generation with Auto-tuned Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Conventional abstractive headline generation methods do not optimize for maximum reader attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates sensational headlines without labeled data by classifying online headlines with many comments against a summarization model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates sensational headlines without labeled data. |
Energy-Based Reranking: Improving Neural Machine Translation Using Energy-Based Models (2021.acl-long)
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Sumanta Bhattacharyya, Amirmohammad Rooshenas, Subhajit Naskar, Simeng Sun, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum
| Challenge: | Autoregressive neural machine translation (NMT) uses a tractable likelihood computation and efficient sampling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an energy-based model to mimic the behavior of the task measure and use it to train an energy based re-ranking algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the samples drawn from the NMT with a higher BLEU score than the experimental model and the energy-based re-ranking algorithm. |
Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have revealed a number of pathologies of neural machine translation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use maximum a posteriori decoding to identify the highest-scoring translation, i.e. the mode problem, to validate the model and its training algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces the statistical data well, but the beam search strays from the statistics. |
Reinforcement Learning with Large Action Spaces for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has argued that the gains produced by Reinforcement learning are mostly due to promoting tokens that have already received a fairly high probability in pre-training. |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that the large action space is a main obstacle to RL’s effectiveness in MT by reducing the size of the vocabulary without changing the vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves by 1.5 BLEU points on average. |
CaLcs: Continuously Approximating Longest Common Subsequence for Sequence Level Optimization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is widely used for text-generation based natural language processing applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train models with maximum-likelihood estimation using a differentiable surrogate of longest common subsequence measure that captures sequence-level structure similarity. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves on the current MLE approach for downstream tasks like text summarization and machine translation. |
Experimenting with Power Divergences for Language Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Language models are an important component in many NLP tasks, where they provide prior knowledge on the language used. |
| Approach: | They propose to use power divergences to prioritize learning on frequent or rare words . they use a sample-based objective to approximate a softmax and noise-constrained estimate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed power divergences can be used to prioritize learning on the frequent or rare words and lead to general performance improvements. |
Distributionally Robust Language Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Language models are generally trained on data spanning a wide range of topics but might be applied to an unknown target distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributionally robust optimization procedure which minimizes the loss of the model over the worst-case mixture of topics with sufficient overlap with the training distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the loss of the model over the worst-case mixture of topics with sufficient overlap with the training distribution. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
Diverse Keyphrase Generation with Neural Unlikelihood Training (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural natural language generation have made possible remarkable progress on the task of keyphrase generation, however, the importance of diversity in keyphrases has been largely ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a sequence-to-sequence keyphrase generation model from the perspective of diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves large diversity gains while maintaining competitive output quality. |
MixCE: Training Autoregressive Language Models by Mixing Forward and Reverse Cross-Entropies (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models are trained by minimizing the cross-entropy of the model distribution Q relative to the data distribution P. However, these systems still struggle in many openended generation settings, where they are asked to produce a long text following a short prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine forward and reverse cross-entropy to train autoregressive language models by minimizing the cross-Entropy of the model distribution Q relative to the data distribution P. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overgeneralizes and produces non-human-like text without complex decoding strategies. |
Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning for Text Generation with Limited Good Data (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant method for training text generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RL formulation for text generation from the soft Q-learning perspective using path consistency learning to combine the best of on-/off-policy updates and learn effectively from sparse reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms MLE and previous RL methods in a wide range of tasks. |
Demystify the Role of Memory in Machine Learning Engineering Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinyu Zhao, Junpeng Wang, Yuzhong Chen, Menghai Pan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Jiarui Sun, Yan Zheng, Mahashweta Das, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Unlike short, reactive exchanges, MLE agents solve tasks through cycles of experimentation and improvement where past errors can inform future success. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic coding memory that captures and reuses debugging experiences and integrates it into two representative agent paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent model captures and reuses debugging experiences and integrates it into two agent paradigms. |
Keyphrase Generation via Soft and Hard Semantic Corrections (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that CorrKG is capable of generating high-quality keyphrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a correction model CorrKG on top of the MLE pipeline to correct the biases . the adaptive adaptive mass learning scheme is designed to better fit OT and FreqFS . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes the semantic biases in keyphrase generation using OT and FreqFS techniques. |
Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to summarize health questions are not able to capture well question focus and lack the ability to understand sentence-level semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a question focus-driven contrastive learning framework to capture question focus and exploit contrastive training at both encoder and decoder to obtain better sentence representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5.33, 12.85 and 3.81 points over the baseline model on three medical benchmark datasets. |
Best Student Forcing: A Simple Training Mechanism in Adversarial Language Generation (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Language models trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) have been considered as a mainstream solution in Natural Language Generation (NLG) however, they are reportedly suffering from training instability and mode collapse, and therefore outperform conventional MLE models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) using best student forcing and discriminators to increase training stability and sample diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques outperform MLE models and outperformed existing approaches in terms of sample diversity and training stability. |
What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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Griffin Adams, Bichlien Nguyen, Jake Smith, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Anna Ostropolets, Budhaditya Deb, Yuan-Jyue Chen, Tristan Naumann, Noémie Elhadad
| Challenge: | Summarization models are trained to maximize the likelihood of a single reference (MLE) but little is known about why one setup is more effective than another . |
| Approach: | They add a calibration step which exposes a model to its own ranked outputs to improve relevance or contrasts positive and negative sets to improve faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration step can unlock large gains in relevance or faithfulness. |
GECSum: Generative Evaluation-Driven Sequence Level Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is a technique in natural language processing that involves generating a summary of a source document by creating new sentences and phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level contrastive learning framework that leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of the abstractive model itself to evaluate summary in reference-based settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in four summarization datasets. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks. |
Prophecy Distillation for Boosting Abstractive Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models with maximum likelihood estimation generate unfaithful facts alongside ambiguous focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which learns a regular summarization model to mimic the behavior of being guided by prophecy for boosting abstractive summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new or matched state-of-the-art on four well-known datasets. |