Closing the Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration
Matthew Finlayson John Hewitt Alexander Koller Swabha Swayamdipta Ashish Sabharwal
Despite their ubiquity in language generation, it remains unknown why
truncation sampling heuristics like nucleus sampling are so effective. We
provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of the truncation
sampling by proving that truncation methods that discard tokens below some
probability threshold (the most common type of truncation) can guarantee that
all sampled tokens have nonzero true probability. However, thresholds are a
coarse heuristic, and necessarily discard some tokens with nonzero true
probability as well. In pursuit of a more precise sampling strategy, we show
that we can leverage a known source of model errors, the softmax bottleneck, to
prove that certain tokens have nonzero true probability, without relying on a
threshold. Based on our findings, we develop an experimental truncation
strategy and the present pilot studies demonstrating the promise of this type
of algorithm. Our evaluations show that our method outperforms its
threshold-based counterparts under automatic and human evaluation metrics for
low-entropy (i.e., close to greedy) open-ended text generation. Our theoretical
findings and pilot experiments provide both insight into why truncation
sampling works, and make progress toward more expressive sampling algorithms
that better surface the generative capabilities of large language models.