Hierarchically Structured Reinforcement Learning for Topically Coherent Visual Story Generation

We propose a hierarchically structured reinforcement learning approach to address the challenges of planning for generating coherent multi-sentence stories for the visual storytelling task. Within our framework, the task of generating a story given a sequence of images is divided across a two-level hierarchical decoder. The high-level decoder constructs a plan by generating a semantic concept (i.e., topic) for each image in sequence. The low-level decoder generates a sentence for each image using a semantic compositional network, which effectively grounds the sentence generation conditioned on the topic. The two decoders are jointly trained end-to-end using reinforcement learning. We evaluate our model on the visual storytelling (VIST) dataset. Empirical results from both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed hierarchically structured reinforced training achieves significantly better performance compared to a strong flat deep reinforcement learning baseline.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

Discourse-Aware Soft Prompting for Text Generation

Current efficient fine-tuning methods (e.g., adapters, prefix-tuning, etc.) have optimized conditional text generation via training a small set of extra parameters of the neural language model, while freezing the rest for efficiency. While showing strong performance on some generation tasks, they don't generalize across all generation tasks. We show that soft-prompt based conditional text generation can be improved with simple and efficient methods that simulate modeling the discourse structure of human written text. We investigate two design choices: First, we apply \textit{hierarchical blocking} on the prefix parameters to simulate a higher-level discourse structure of human written text. Second, we apply \textit{attention sparsity} on the prefix parameters at different layers of the network and learn sparse transformations on the softmax-function. We show that structured design of prefix parameters yields more coherent, faithful and relevant generations than the baseline prefix-tuning on all generation tasks

Look-back Decoding for Open-Ended Text Generation

Given a prefix (context), open-ended generation aims to decode texts that are coherent, which don't abruptly drift from previous topics, and informative, which don't suffer from undesired repetitions. In this paper, we propose Look-back, an improved decoding algorithm that leverages the Kullback-Leibler divergence to track the distribution distance between current and historical decoding steps. Thus Look-back can automatically predict potential repetitive phrase and topic drift, and remove tokens that may cause the failure modes, restricting the next token probability distribution within a plausible distance to the history. We perform decoding experiments on document continuation and story generation, and demonstrate that Look-back is able to generate more fluent and coherent text, outperforming other strong decoding methods significantly in both automatic and human evaluations