Differentiable Scheduled Sampling for Credit Assignment

Kartik Goyal, Chris Dyer, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick


Abstract
We demonstrate that a continuous relaxation of the argmax operation can be used to create a differentiable approximation to greedy decoding in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models. By incorporating this approximation into the scheduled sampling training procedure–a well-known technique for correcting exposure bias–we introduce a new training objective that is continuous and differentiable everywhere and can provide informative gradients near points where previous decoding decisions change their value. By using a related approximation, we also demonstrate a similar approach to sampled-based training. We show that our approach outperforms both standard cross-entropy training and scheduled sampling procedures in two sequence prediction tasks: named entity recognition and machine translation.
Anthology ID:
P17-2058
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
366–371
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2058
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-2058
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kartik Goyal, Chris Dyer, and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. 2017. Differentiable Scheduled Sampling for Credit Assignment. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 366–371, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Differentiable Scheduled Sampling for Credit Assignment (Goyal et al., ACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-2058.pdf