Papers › Deep Residual Output Layers for Neural Language Generation
Deep Residual Output Layers for Neural Language Generation
Nikolaos Pappas, James Henderson
Many tasks, including language generation, benefit from learning the structure of the output space, particularly when the space of output labels is large and the data is sparse. State-of-the-art neural language models indirectly capture the output space structure in their classifier weights since they lack parameter sharing across output labels. Learning shared output label mappings helps, but existing methods have limited expressivity and are prone to overfitting. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of more powerful shared mappings for output labels, and propose a deep residual output mapping with dropout between layers to better capture the structure of the output space and avoid overfitting. Evaluations on three language generation tasks show that our output label mapping can match or improve state-of-the-art recurrent and self-attention architectures, and suggest that the classifier does not necessarily need to be high-rank to better model natural language if it is better at capturing the structure of the output space.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Params | 24M | #12 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Test perplexity | 49.4 | #12 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Validation perplexity | 49.5 | #12 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Params | 24M | #25 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Test perplexity | 55.7 | #25 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Word Level) | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Validation perplexity | 58.2 | #25 of 43 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Number of params | 34M | #17 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Test perplexity | 42.0 | #17 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL + dynamic eval | Validation perplexity | 43.9 | #17 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Number of params | 34M | #28 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Test perplexity | 61.9 | #28 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-2 | AWD-LSTM-DRILL | Validation perplexity | 64.9 | #28 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Machine Translation | WMT2014 English-German | Transformer-DRILL Base | BLEU score | 28.1 | #48 of 91 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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