Pareto-optimal Non-uniform Language Generation

Kleinberg and Mullainathan (2024) recently proposed an interesting model for language generation in the limit: Given a countable collection of languages, and an adversary enumerating the strings of some language L from the collection, the objective is to generate new strings from the target language, such that all strings generated beyond some finite time are valid. Li, Raman and Tewari (2024) and Charikar and Pabbaraju (2024) showed strong non-uniform generation guarantees in this model, giving algorithms that generate new valid strings from L after seeing a number of distinct input strings t(L) that depends only on L (and the collection), but not the enumeration order. However, for both these works, the language-wise generation times t(L) of the algorithm can be strictly sub-optimal. In this work, we study Pareto-optimality of non-uniform language generation in the limit. We propose an algorithm, whose generation times t^star(L) are (almost) Pareto-optimal: any other algorithm whose generation time for some language L is strictly smaller than t^star(L), must satisfy that its generation time for some other language L' is strictly worse than t^star(L'). Pareto-optimality is essentially the best that one can achieve for non-uniform generation. Our algorithmic framework conveniently adapts to further give Pareto-optimal non-uniform generation algorithms in the practically motivated settings of noisy as well as representative generation.