Sequence transduction models have been widely explored in many natural language processing tasks. However, the target sequence usually consists of discrete tokens which represent word indices in a given vocabulary. We barely see the case where target sequence is composed of continuous vectors, where each vector is an element of a time series taken successively in a temporal domain. In this work, we introduce a new data set, named Action Generation Data Set (AGDS) which is specifically designed to carry out the task of caption-to-action generation. This data set contains caption-action pairs. The caption is comprised of a sequence of words describing the interactive movement between two people, and the action is a captured sequence of poses representing the movement. This data set is introduced to study the ability of generating continuous sequences through sequence transduction models. We also propose a model to innovatively combine Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) together. In our model, we have one generator to generate actions from captions and three discriminators where each of them is designed to carry out a unique functionality: caption-action consistency discriminator, pose discriminator and pose transition discriminator. This novel design allowed us to achieve plausible generation performance which is demonstrated in the experiments.
Generative adversarial network (GAN) @cite_18 has also been employed to language generation task. In @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_5 , the generator is the sequence transduction model, and the discriminator is to discriminate between machine generated sequences and the human generated ones. Policy gradient update and Monte Carlo search are utilised to solve the generator differentiation problem. Moreover, teacher forcing plays a significant role in improving training stability in the adversarial training structure.
@cite_5 @cite_18 @cite_23 @cite_15
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As a new way of training generative models, Generative Adversarial Net (GAN) that uses a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model has enjoyed considerable success in generating real-valued data. However, it has limitations when the goal is for generating sequences of discrete tokens. A major reason lies in that the discrete outputs from the generative model make it difficult to pass the gradient update from the discriminative model to the generative model. Also, the discriminative model can only assess a complete sequence, while for a partially generated sequence, it is nontrivial to balance its current score and the future one once the entire sequence has been generated. In this paper, we propose a sequence generation framework, called SeqGAN, to solve the problems. Modeling the data generator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning (RL), SeqGAN bypasses the generator differentiation problem by directly performing gradient policy update. The RL reward signal comes from the GAN discriminator judged on a complete sequence, and is passed back to the intermediate state-action steps using Monte Carlo search. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real-world tasks demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines. As a new way of training generative models, Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) that uses a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model has enjoyed considerable success in generating real-valued data. However, it has limitations when the goal is for generating sequences of discrete tokens. A major reason lies in that the discrete outputs from the generative model make it difficult to pass the gradient update from the discriminative model to the generative model. Also, the discriminative model can only assess a complete sequence, while for a partially generated sequence, it is non-trivial to balance its current score and the future one once the entire sequence has been generated. In this paper, we propose a sequence generation framework, called SeqGAN, to solve the problems. Modeling the data generator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning (RL), SeqGAN bypasses the generator differentiation problem by directly performing gradient policy update. The RL reward signal comes from the GAN discriminator judged on a complete sequence, and is passed back to the intermediate state-action steps using Monte Carlo search. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real-world tasks demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines. Sequence generative adversarial networks (SeqGAN) have been used to improve conditional sequence generation tasks, for example, chit-chat dialogue generation. To stabilize the training of SeqGAN, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) or reward at every generation step (REGS) is used to evaluate the goodness of a generated subsequence. MCTS is computationally intensive, but the performance of REGS is worse than MCTS. In this paper, we propose stepwise GAN (StepGAN), in which the discriminator is modified to automatically assign scores quantifying the goodness of each subsequence at every generation step. StepGAN has significantly less computational costs than MCTS. We demonstrate that StepGAN outperforms previous GAN-based methods on both synthetic experiment and chit-chat dialogue generation. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a learning framework that rely on training a discriminator to estimate a measure of difference between a target and generated distributions. GANs, as normally formulated, rely on the generated samples being completely differentiable w.r.t. the generative parameters, and thus do not work for discrete data. We introduce a method for training GANs with discrete data that uses the estimated difference measure from the discriminator to compute importance weights for generated samples, thus providing a policy gradient for training the generator. The importance weights have a strong connection to the decision boundary of the discriminator, and we call our method boundary-seeking GANs (BGANs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with discrete image and character-based natural language generation. In addition, the boundary-seeking objective extends to continuous data, which can be used to improve stability of training.