Papers with decoding algorithm
Subset Retrieval Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) is a new approach to improve NMT performance without additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates example-search into the decoding algorithm to improve neighbor token retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a speed-up of up to 132.2 times and an improvement in BLEU score of up 1.6 compared with kNN-MT in the WMT’19 translation task and the domain adaptation tasks in De-En and En-Ja. |
MR-P: A Parallel Decoding Algorithm for Iterative Refinement Non-Autoregressive Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive neural machine translation models remove dependency between tokens in the target sentence and generate all tokens on parallel . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive neural machine translation model that decodes with the Mask-Predict algorithm which iteratively refines the output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm increases the performance of the WMT’14 translation task by 1.39 points. |
Code-Switching for Enhancing NMT with Pre-Specified Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to constrain NMT use placeholder tags for lexicon words and hard constraints during decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use placeholder tags to replace lexicon words with target translations . they use a data augmentation method to make code-switched training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality without hurting unconstrained words. |
Improving Beam Search by Removing Monotonic Constraint for Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | a beam search algorithm produces monotonic left-to-right order, meaning a hypothesis cannot be revisited . a proposed algorithm allows discarded hypotheses to be recovered in a later step. |
| Approach: | They propose to decode a beam search algorithm that considers multiple hypotheses simultaneously . they propose to maintain all found hypothese a single priority queue and a universal score function . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves translations even for high-performance models in English-Japanese translation task. |
NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics (2022.naacl-main)
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Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, Peter West, Liwei Jiang, Jungo Kasai, Daniel Khashabi, Ronan Le Bras, Lianhui Qin, Youngjae Yu, Rowan Zellers, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for text generation are left-to-right decoding from autoregressive language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding algorithm that incorporates heuristic estimates of future cost that are efficient for large-scale language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on five generation tasks and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on table-to-text generation, constrained machine translation, and keyword-constrained generation. |
Look-back Decoding for Open-Ended Text Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decode open-ended text have addressed degeneration problems in large-scale language models (LLMs) |
| Approach: | They propose an improved decoding algorithm that leverages the Kullback–Leibler divergence to track the distribution distance between current and historical decoding steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in document continuation and story generation. |
Penalty Decoding: Well Suppress the Self-Reinforcement Effect in Open-Ended Text Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating high-quality sentences resembling human output. |
| Approach: | They propose a forgetting mechanism that disregards distant tokens, reducing the burden of penalty selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates high-quality sentences resembling human output. |
Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models pick up and reproduce undesirable biases when trained on large, unfiltered crawls from the Internet. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding algorithm that, given only a textual description of the undesired behavior, reduces the probability of a language model producing problematic text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the probability of a language model producing problematic text by giving only a textual description of the undesired behavior. |
How to Avoid Sentences Spelling Boring? Towards a Neural Approach to Unsupervised Metaphor Generation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate metaphors rely on template-based or rule-based knowledge, which constrains the diversity of generated metaphors. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach to metaphor generation that uses wiki corpus to extract metaphorically used verbs and train a language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates metaphors with good readability and creativity using wiki corpus and automatic metrics and human evaluations. |
Language Model Decoding as Likelihood–Utility Alignment (2023.findings-eacl)
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Martin Josifoski, Maxime Peyrard, Frano Rajič, Jiheng Wei, Debjit Paul, Valentin Hartmann, Barun Patra, Vishrav Chaudhary, Emre Kiciman, Boi Faltings
| Challenge: | Existing studies only compare decoding algorithms in narrow scenarios, and their findings do not generalize across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of misalignment mitigation strategies to provide a unifying view of decoding as a tool for alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy combines likelihood and utility assumptions to provide general statements about decoding as a tool for alignment across tasks. |
Stack-Pointer Networks for Dependency Parsing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dependency parsing are local and greedy transitionbased . StackPtr parsers use the information of whole sentences and previously derived subtree structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a stack-pointer network-based dependency parser that reads whole sentence and builds dependency tree top-down in a depth-first fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reads and encodes whole sentence, then builds dependency tree top-down (from root-to-leaf) in a depth-first fashion. |
A Neural Approach to Pun Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | generating puns with artificial intelligence techniques requires manual training and templates. |
| Approach: | They propose neural network models for homographic pun generation that can generate puns without requiring any pun data for training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models generate homographic puns of good readability and quality without training. |
A Template-based Method for Constrained Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve this problem can not satisfy the following three desiderata: (1) high translation quality, (2) high match accuracy, and (3) low latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method that can provide high translation quality and match accuracy and a low latency inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in lexically and structurally constrained translation tasks and can be used in a variety of applications. |
Waste Not, Want Not; Recycled Gumbel Noise Improves Consistency in Natural Language Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Consistency in the output of language models can vary significantly in style, factual accuracy, and tone, even for similar inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding algorithm that enhances response consistency across different prompts with no degradation in response quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard sampling methods by 10% across semantic and stylistic consistency benchmarks. |
Training Neural Machine Translation to Apply Terminology Constraints (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate domain terminology into neural machine translation (NMT) are brittle when tested in real-world situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject custom terminology into neural machine translation at run time by using the target side of terminology entries whose source side match the input as decoding-time constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is faster than state-of-the-art decoding and more efficient than constraint-free decoding. |
Graph Based Decoding for Event Sequencing and Coreference Resolution (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we study two types of relation between events in text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based decoding algorithm that is applicable to both tasks . they propose ES and EH to solve the event coreference problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding algorithm beats a strong temporal-based, oracle-informed baseline. |
DC-MBR: Distributional Cooling for Minimum Bayesian Risk Decoding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding target language are degenerate, hallucinating or empty. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that tunes down the Softmax temperature to reduce autoregressive over-smoothness by label smoothing the output distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves MBR in various settings. |
An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds. |
Unsupervised Paraphrasing with Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation has benefited from recent advances in the design of training objectives and model architectures, but previous studies focused on supervised methods that require a large amount of labeled data that is costly to collect. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning approach that enables pre-trained language models to generate high-quality paraphrases in an unsupervised setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on the Quora Question Pair and ParaNMT datasets and is robust to domain shift between the two datasets. |
Benchmarking and Improving Text-to-SQL Generation under Ambiguity (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding algorithms treat SQL queries as a string and produce unhelpful token-level diversity in the top-k. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking algorithm that generates all SQLs in top-k ranked outputs . they use plan-based template generation and constrained infilling to bridge this gap . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is 2.5 times more effective than state-of-the-art models at generating all candidate SQLs in the top-k ranked outputs. |
Consistency of a Recurrent Language Model With Respect to Incomplete Decoding (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood have been shown to exhibit issues such as length bias and degenerate repetition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a recurrent language model to address inconsistency in decoding algorithms that are inconsistent despite the fact that recursive language models are trained to produce sequences of finite length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods prevent inconsistency in the proposed models. |
Integrating Vectorized Lexical Constraints for Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on integrating discrete lexical constraints into neural machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate constraints into NMT models by integrating them into keys and values . they show that their method outperforms representative baselines on four language pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four language pairs, showing superiority . |
NEUROSTRUCTURAL DECODING: Neural Text Generation with Structural Constraints (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches for conditional text generation focus on lexical constraints, but lack syntactic constraints to support complex semantic constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding algorithm that incorporates syntactic constraints to improve the quality of the generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three different language generation tasks and shows improved lexical and syntactic metrics. |
High-order Joint Constituency and Dependency Parsing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic parsing aims to reveal how sentences are syntactically structured. |
| Approach: | They propose to produce compatible constituency and dependency trees simultaneously for input sentences . they adopt a much more efficient decoding algorithm and explore joint modeling at training phase . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves matching ratio of whole trees compared to separate models . the proposed model adopts a much more efficient decoding algorithm . |
Sampling-Based Approximations to Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve beam search quality are inadequate in many ways . a new approximation to the beam search curse has been proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose an approximation to minimum Bayes risk decoding that would solve the beam search curse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approximation has no equivalent to the beam search curse. |
Linguistically Motivated Sign Language Segmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sign language segmentation is a crucial task in sign language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two kinds of segmentation: segmentation into individual signs and segmentation to segment into phrases, larger units comprising several signs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on linguistic cues observed in sign language corpora and replaces the predominant IO tagging scheme with BIO taging to account for continuous signing. |
What Comes Next? Evaluating Uncertainty in Neural Text Generators Against Human Production Variability (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In Natural Language Generation tasks, multiple communicative goals are plausible and any goal can be put into words, or produced, in multiple ways. |
| Approach: | They characterise the extent to which human production varies lexically, syntactically, and semantically across four NLG tasks, connecting human production variability to aleatoric or data uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be calibrated to human production variability using multiple samples and, when possible, multiple references. |
Fuzzy Speculative Decoding for a Tunable Accuracy-Runtime Tradeoff (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative Decoding (SD) enforces strict distributional equivalence to the target model when accepting candidate tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding algorithm that generalizes SD by accepting candidate tokens based on the divergences between the target and draft model distributions. |
| Outcome: | Using Fuzzy Speculative Decoding (FSD) we show that the proposed method can achieve significant runtime improvements of over 5 tokens per second faster than SD at only an approximate 2% reduction in benchmark accuracy. |
Breaking the Autoregressive Chain: Hyper-Parallel Decoding for Efficient LLM-Based Attribute Value Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation require multiple independent sequences to be decoded in parallel. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that accelerates offline decoding by leveraging shared memory and computation across batches. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that attribute-value pairs are conditionally independent, enabling decoding in parallel up to 96 tokens per prompt. |