mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Generating Diverse and High-Quality Texts by Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

arXiv 2401.05054 ↗First posted 10 Jan 2024cs.CL cs.AIcited by 11

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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.

References · 48

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36 more
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 3; 2026: 3.

11 papers.