NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics
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
Abstract
The dominant paradigm for neural text generation is left-to-right decoding from autoregressive language models. Constrained or controllable generation under complex lexical constraints, however, requires foresight to plan ahead feasible future paths. Drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm, we propose NeuroLogic A*esque, a decoding algorithm that incorporates heuristic estimates of future cost. We develop lookahead heuristics that are efficient for large-scale language models, making our method a drop-in replacement for common techniques such as beam search and top-k sampling. To enable constrained generation, we build on NeuroLogic decoding (Lu et al., 2021), combining its flexibility in incorporating logical constraints with A*esque estimates of future constraint satisfaction. Our approach outperforms competitive 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. The improvements are particularly notable on tasks that require complex constraint satisfaction or in few-shot or zero-shot settings. NeuroLogic A*esque illustrates the power of decoding for improving and enabling new capabilities of large-scale language models.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.naacl-main.57
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Seattle, United States
- Editors:
- Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 780–799
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.57
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.57
- Award:
- Best new method paper
- Cite (ACL):
- Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, Peter West, Liwei Jiang, Jungo Kasai, Daniel Khashabi, Ronan Le Bras, Lianhui Qin, Youngjae Yu, Rowan Zellers, Noah A. Smith, and Yejin Choi. 2022. NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 780–799, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics (Lu et al., NAACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.naacl-main.57.pdf
- Code
- GXimingLu/a_star_neurologic
- Data
- CommonGen, ROCStories