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Poster

Trainable Decoding of Sets of Sequences for Neural Sequence Models

Ashwin Kalyan · Peter Anderson · Stefan Lee · Dhruv Batra

Pacific Ballroom #48

Keywords: [ Deep Sequence Models ] [ Structured Prediction ]


Abstract: Many sequence prediction tasks admit multiple correct outputs and so, it is often useful to decode a set of outputs that maximize some task-specific set-level metric. However, retooling standard sequence prediction procedures tailored towards predicting the single best output leads to the decoding of sets containing very similar sequences; failing to capture the variation in the output space. To address this, we propose $\nabla$BS, a trainable decoding procedure that outputs a set of sequences, highly valued according to the metric. Our method tightly integrates the training and decoding phases and further allows for the optimization of the task-specific metric addressing the shortcomings of standard sequence prediction. Further, we discuss the trade-offs of commonly used set-level metrics and motivate a new set-level metric that naturally evaluates the notion of ``capturing the variation in the output space''. Finally, we show results on the image captioning task and find that our model outperforms standard techniques and natural ablations.

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