Papers › A Frustratingly Simple Decoding Method for Neural Text Generation

A Frustratingly Simple Decoding Method for Neural Text Generation

22 May 2023arXiv:2305.12675archive 2025-07-28

Haoran Yang, Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Wei Bi, Wai Lam, Shuming Shi

We introduce a frustratingly simple, super efficient and surprisingly effective decoding method, which we call Frustratingly Simple Decoding (FSD), for neural text generation. The idea behind FSD is straightforward: we build an anti-LM based on previously generated text and use this anti-LM to penalize future generation of what has been generated. The anti-LM can be implemented as simple as an n-gram language model or a vectorized variant. In this way, FSD introduces no extra model parameters and negligible computational overhead (FSD can be as fast as greedy search). Despite the simplicity, FSD is surprisingly effective; Experiments show that FSD can outperform the canonical methods to date (i.e., nucleus sampling) as well as several strong baselines that were proposed recently.

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Language ModelingLanguage ModellingText Generation

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