# Beyond MLE: Convex Learning for Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17217/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07947/) (2016)
- [Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06732/) (2015)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02281/) (2017)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [A Deep Reinforced Model for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04304/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07086/) (2016)
- [Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07100/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Non-autoregressive Generation Framework for End-to-End Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06937/) (2024)
- [Language Generation with Strictly Proper Scoring Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18906/) (2024)
- [Beyond Next Token Prediction: Patch-Level Training for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12665/) (2024)
- [Fully Rotation-Equivariant Spectral-Spatial Learning for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05148/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a statistical method used to estimate the parameters of a probability distribution that best explain the observed data. In the context of text generation, MLE is often used to train generative language models, which can then be used to generate new text. However, we argue that MLE is not always necessary and optimal, especially for closed-ended text generation tasks like machine translation. In these tasks, the goal of model is to generate the most appropriate response, which does not necessarily require it to estimate the entire data distribution with MLE. To this end, we propose a novel class of training objectives based on convex functions, which enables text generation models to focus on highly probable outputs without having to estimate the entire data distribution. We investigate the theoretical properties of the optimal predicted distribution when applying convex functions to the loss, demonstrating that convex functions can sharpen the optimal distribution, thereby enabling the model to better capture outputs with high probabilities. Experiments on various text generation tasks and models show the effectiveness of our approach. It enables autoregressive models to bridge the gap between greedy and beam search, and facilitates the learning of non-autoregressive models with a maximum improvement of 9+ BLEU points. Moreover, our approach also exhibits significant impact on large language models (LLMs), substantially enhancing their generative capability on various tasks. Source code is available at urlhttps://github.com/ictnlp/Convex-Learning.