Generating Diverse and High-Quality Texts by Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding
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Abstract (arXiv)
One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse. Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest quality among the decoding algorithms. However, existing algorithms proposed for generating diverse outputs are predominantly based on beam search or random sampling, thus their output quality is capped by these underlying methods. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach -- we develop diversity-promoting decoding algorithms by enforcing diversity objectives to MBR decoding. We propose two variants of MBR, Diverse MBR (DMBR) and k-medoids MBR (KMBR), methods to generate a set of sentences with high quality and diversity. We evaluate DMBR and KMBR on a variety of directed text generation tasks using encoder-decoder models and a large language model with prompting. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a better trade-off than the diverse beam search and sampling algorithms.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 80 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2024.
Builds on
48 of 80 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 3; 2026: 3.
11 papers.
- 2024QUEST: Quality-Aware Metropolis-Hastings Sampling for Machine Translationcited by 16
- 2025Control the Temperature: Selective Sampling for Diverse and High-Quality LLM Outputscited by 15
- 2024mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk Decodingcited by 13
- 2025Revisiting Compositional Generalization Capability of Large Language Models Considering Instruction Following Abilitycited by 10
- 2024Diversity Explains Inference Scaling Laws: Through a Case Study of Minimum Bayes Risk Decodingcited by 8
- 2024Annotation-Efficient Language Model Alignment via Diverse and Representative Response Textscited by 3
- 2024On the True Distribution Approximation of Minimum Bayes-Risk Decodingcited by 2
- 2025Exploring the Relationship Between Diversity and Quality in Ad Text Generationcited by 0
- 2026Large Language Models as Amortized Pareto-Front Generators for Constrained Bi-Objective Convex Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026How Neural Reward Models Learn Features for Policy Optimization: A Single-Index Analysiscited by 0
- 2026TalkMatrix: Generating Character Dialogue that is Both Consistent and Diversecited by 0
- 2026TalkMatrix: Generating Character Dialogue that is Both Consistent and Diverse20 Jul 2026
- 2026How Neural Reward Models Learn Features for Policy Optimization: A Single-Index Analysis23 May 2026
- 2026Large Language Models as Amortized Pareto-Front Generators for Constrained Bi-Objective Convex Optimization12 May 2026
- 2025Control the Temperature: Selective Sampling for Diverse and High-Quality LLM Outputs20 Sep 2025
- 2025Revisiting Compositional Generalization Capability of Large Language Models Considering Instruction Following Ability18 Jun 2025
- 2025Exploring the Relationship Between Diversity and Quality in Ad Text Generation22 May 2025
- 2024Diversity Explains Inference Scaling Laws: Through a Case Study of Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding19 Oct 2024
- 2024mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding8 Aug 2024
- 2024QUEST: Quality-Aware Metropolis-Hastings Sampling for Machine Translation28 May 2024
- 2024Annotation-Efficient Language Model Alignment via Diverse and Representative Response Texts22 May 2024
- 2024On the True Distribution Approximation of Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding31 Mar 2024