Florian Strub


2022

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Learning Natural Language Generation with Truncated Reinforcement Learning
Alice Martin | Guillaume Quispe | Charles Ollion | Sylvain Le Corff | Florian Strub | Olivier Pietquin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

This paper introduces TRUncated ReinForcement Learning for Language (TrufLL), an original approach to train conditional languagemodels without a supervised learning phase, by only using reinforcement learning (RL). As RL methods unsuccessfully scale to large action spaces, we dynamically truncate the vocabulary space using a generic language model. TrufLL thus enables to train a language agent by solely interacting with its environment without any task-specific prior knowledge; it is only guided with a task-agnostic language model. Interestingly, this approach avoids the dependency to labelled datasets and inherently reduces pretrained policy flaws such as language or exposure biases. We evaluate TrufLL on two visual question generation tasks, for which we report positive results over performance and language metrics, which we then corroborate with a human evaluation. To our knowledge, it is the first approach that successfully learns a language generation policy without pre-training, using only reinforcement learning.

2021

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Visually Grounded Interaction and Language
Cătălina Cangea | Abhishek Das | Drew Hudson | Jacob Krantz | Stefan Lee | Jiayuan Mao | Florian Strub | Alane Suhr | Erik Wijmans
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Visually Grounded Interaction and Language

2020

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Supervised Seeded Iterated Learning for Interactive Language Learning
Yuchen Lu | Soumye Singhal | Florian Strub | Olivier Pietquin | Aaron Courville
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Language drift has been one of the major obstacles to train language models through interaction. When word-based conversational agents are trained towards completing a task, they tend to invent their language rather than leveraging natural language. In recent literature, two general methods partially counter this phenomenon: Supervised Selfplay (S2P) and Seeded Iterated Learning (SIL). While S2P jointly trains interactive and supervised losses to counter the drift, SIL changes the training dynamics to prevent language drift from occurring. In this paper, we first highlight their respective weaknesses, i.e., late-stage training collapses and higher negative likelihood when evaluated on human corpus. Given these observations, we introduce Supervised Seeded Iterated Learning (SSIL) to combine both methods to minimize their respective weaknesses. We then show the effectiveness of in the language-drift translation game.