Best Student Forcing: A Simple Training Mechanism in Adversarial Language Generation

Jonathan Sauder, Ting Hu, Xiaoyin Che, Goncalo Mordido, Haojin Yang, Christoph Meinel

Abstract
Language models trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) have been considered as a mainstream solution in Natural Language Generation (NLG) for years. Recently, various approaches with Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have also been proposed. While offering exciting new prospects, GANs in NLG by far are nevertheless reportedly suffering from training instability and mode collapse, and therefore outperformed by conventional MLE models. In this work, we propose techniques for improving GANs in NLG, namely Best Student Forcing (BSF), a novel yet simple adversarial training mechanism in which generated sequences of high quality are selected as temporary ground-truth to further train the generator. We also use an ensemble of discriminators to increase training stability and sample diversity. Evaluation shows that the combination of BSF and multiple discriminators consistently performs better than previous GAN approaches over various metrics, and outperforms a baseline MLE in terms of Fr ́ech ́et Distance, a recently proposed metric capturing both sample quality and diversity.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.576
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4680–4688
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.576
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Sauder, Ting Hu, Xiaoyin Che, Goncalo Mordido, Haojin Yang, and Christoph Meinel. 2020. Best Student Forcing: A Simple Training Mechanism in Adversarial Language Generation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4680–4688, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Best Student Forcing: A Simple Training Mechanism in Adversarial Language Generation (Sauder et al., LREC 2020)
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