Sainbayar Sukhbaatar


2022

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Director: Generator-Classifiers For Supervised Language Modeling
Kushal Arora | Kurt Shuster | Sainbayar Sukhbaatar | Jason Weston
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Current language models achieve low perplexity but their resulting generations still suffer from toxic responses, repetitiveness, and contradictions. The standard language modeling setup fails to address these issues. In this paper, we introduce a new architecture, Director, that consists of a unified generator-classifier with both a language modeling and a classification head for each output token. Training is conducted jointly using both standard language modeling data, and data labeled with desirable and undesirable sequences. Experiments in several settings show that the model has competitive training and decoding speed compared to standard language models while yielding superior results, avoiding undesirable behaviors while maintaining generation quality. It also outperforms existing model guiding approaches in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Our code is made publicly available.

2019

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Adaptive Attention Span in Transformers
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar | Edouard Grave | Piotr Bojanowski | Armand Joulin
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We propose a novel self-attention mechanism that can learn its optimal attention span. This allows us to extend significantly the maximum context size used in Transformer, while maintaining control over their memory footprint and computational time. We show the effectiveness of our approach on the task of character level language modeling, where we achieve state-of-the-art performances on text8 and enwiki8 by using a maximum context of 8k characters.

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Training Hybrid Language Models by Marginalizing over Segmentations
Edouard Grave | Sainbayar Sukhbaatar | Piotr Bojanowski | Armand Joulin
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this paper, we study the problem of hybrid language modeling, that is using models which can predict both characters and larger units such as character ngrams or words. Using such models, multiple potential segmentations usually exist for a given string, for example one using words and one using characters only. Thus, the probability of a string is the sum of the probabilities of all the possible segmentations. Here, we show how it is possible to marginalize over the segmentations efficiently, in order to compute the true probability of a sequence. We apply our technique on three datasets, comprising seven languages, showing improvements over a strong character level language model.