Paper:
Traditional natural language generation (NLG) models are trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) which differs from the sample generation inference procedure. During training the ground truth tokens are passed to the model, however, during inference, the model instead reads its previously generated samples -a phenomenon coined exposure bias. Exposure bias was hypothesized to be a root cause of poor sample quality and thus many generative adversarial networks (GANs) were proposed as a remedy since they have identical training and inference. However, many of the ensuing GAN variants validated sample quality improvements but ignored loss of sample diversity. This work reiterates the fallacy of quality-only metrics and clearly demonstrate that the well-established technique of reducing softmax temperature can outperform GANs on a quality-only metric. Further, we establish a definitive quality-diversity evaluation procedure using temperature tuning over local and global sample metrics. Under this, we find that MLE models consistently outperform the proposed GAN variants over the whole quality-diversity space. Specifically, we find that 1) exposure bias appears to be less of an issue than the complications arising from non-differentiable, sequential GAN training; 2) MLE trained models provide a better quality/diversity tradeoff compared to their GAN counterparts, all while being easier to train, easier to cross-validate, and less computationally expensive.

Review:
This paper concerns the limitation of the quality-only evaluation metric for text generation models. Instead, a desirable evaluation metric should not only measure the sample quality, but also the sample diversity, to prevent the mode collapse problem in gan-based models generation. The author presents an interesting, but not too surprising finding that, tuning the temperature beam search sampling consistently outperform all other GAN/RL-based training method for text generation models. The idea of sweeping temperature during beam search decoding is not new in the NLP community, which limits the novelty of this paper. What’s more, some parts of the experiment results is also somehow not new, in the sense that the SBLEU vs Negative BLEU tradeoff curve is also shown in [1,2,3,4].
[1] Jointly measuring diversity and quality in text generation models, 2019
[2] Training language gans from scratch, 2019
[3] On accurate evaluation of gans for language generation, 2018
[4] Towards Text Generation with Adversarially Learned Neural Outlines, 2018
I would love to increase my score if the author could address the following comments:
(1) Are the comparing methods, say MLE models and other GAN-based models, have the similar number of model parameters? It is not clear from the paper. Otherwise, one can use a 12/24 layer Transformer-XL to have dominative performance?
(2) Since this is an empirical study paper. It would be great if this paper can also present more SoTA models trained by MLE such as Transformer-XL on more challenging datasets, such as Wikitext-2 or Wikitext-103. In this kind of large vocabulary datasets, I think the RL/GAN-based training methods would easily breakdown, and far worse than MLE-based training.
(3) To make the empirical study more comprehensive, the author could perhaps evaluate with the n-gram and FED metric.