Papers › From Credit Assignment to Entropy Regularization: Two New Algorithms for Neural...

From Credit Assignment to Entropy Regularization: Two New Algorithms for Neural Sequence Prediction

29 Apr 2018ACL 2018 7arXiv:1804.10974archive 2025-07-28

Zihang Dai, Qizhe Xie, Eduard Hovy

In this work, we study the credit assignment problem in reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) learning, and establish a theoretical equivalence between the token-level counterpart of RAML and the entropy regularized reinforcement learning. Inspired by the connection, we propose two sequence prediction algorithms, one extending RAML with fine-grained credit assignment and the other improving Actor-Critic with a systematic entropy regularization. On two benchmark datasets, we show the proposed algorithms outperform RAML and Actor-Critic respectively, providing new alternatives to sequence prediction.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

zihangdai/ERAC-VAML officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

PredictionReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections