Papers › Deep Residual Output Layers for Neural Language Generation

Deep Residual Output Layers for Neural Language Generation

14 May 2019arXiv:1905.05513archive 2025-07-28

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

idiap/drill officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Language ModellingMachine TranslationText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
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

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Methods

Dropout

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