On-the-Fly Attention Modulation for Neural Generation
Open accessAbstract
Despite considerable advancements with deep neural language models (LMs), neural text generation still suffers from degeneration: the generated text is repetitive, generic, selfcontradictory, and often lacks commonsense.Our analyses on sentence-level attention patterns in LMs reveal that neural degeneration may be associated with insufficient learning of task-specific characteristics by the attention mechanism.This finding motivates onthe-fly attention modulation 1 -a simple but effective method that enables the injection of priors into attention computation during inference.Automatic and human evaluation results on three text generation benchmarks demonstrate that attention modulation helps LMs generate text with enhanced fluency, creativity, and commonsense reasoning, in addition to significantly reduce sentence-level repetition.
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- Authors
- Dong, Y., Bhagavatula, C., Lu, X., Hwang, J. D., Bosselut, A., Cheung, J. C. K., & Choi, Y.
- Affiliations
- McGill University (CA)
- Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
- University of Washington (US)
- Venue
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021
- Published
- 2021
- Pages
- 1261-1274
- OpenAlex
- W3174704627
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 0.69
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (Findings of ACL) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1714566)
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N66001-19-2-4031, N66001-19)
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
- Keywords
- attentional modulation, neural text generation, commonsense reasoning, repetition reduction, text fluency
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