{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/faster-minimum-bayes-risk-decoding-with","title":"Faster Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding with Confidence-based Pruning","arxiv_id":"2311.14919","date":"2023-11-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Julius Cheng","Andreas Vlachos"],"abstract":"Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding outputs the hypothesis with the highest expected utility over the model distribution for some utility function. It has been shown to improve accuracy over beam search in conditional language generation problems and especially neural machine translation, in both human and automatic evaluations. However, the standard sampling-based algorithm for MBR is substantially more computationally expensive than beam search, requiring a large number of samples as well as a quadratic number of calls to the utility function, limiting its applicability. We describe an algorithm for MBR which gradually grows the number of samples used to estimate the utility while pruning hypotheses that are unlikely to have the highest utility according to confidence estimates obtained with bootstrap sampling. Our method requires fewer samples and drastically reduces the number of calls to the utility function compared to standard MBR while being statistically indistinguishable in terms of accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in experiments on three language pairs, using chrF++ and COMET as utility/evaluation metrics.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14919v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.14919v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"faster-minimum-bayes-risk-decoding-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/juliusc/pruning_mbr","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.14919","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2311.14919"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/juliusc/pruning_mbr","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"3eb2493df603a728","entry":"decode_bottom_pct","repo":"juliusc/pruning_mbr","repo_kind":"official","path":"pruning_mbr/lib/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/juliusc/pruning_mbr/blob/HEAD/pruning_mbr/lib/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"3eb2493df603a728"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}