Quantifying Exposure Bias for Open-ended Language Generation

Tianxing He, Jingzhao Zhang, Zhiming Zhou, James R. Glass

Keywords: exposure bias, natural language generation, autoregressive

Abstract: The exposure bias problem refers to the incrementally distorted generation induced by the training-generation discrepancy, in teacher-forcing training for auto-regressive neural network language models (LM). It has been regarded as a central problem for LMs trained for open-ended language generation. Although a lot of algorithms have been proposed to avoid teacher forcing and therefore alleviate exposure bias, there is little work showing how serious the exposure bias problem actually is. In this work, we propose novel metrics to quantify the impact of exposure bias in the generation of MLE-trained LMs. Our key intuition is that if we feed ground-truth data prefixes (instead of prefixes generated by the model itself) into the model and ask it to continue the generation, the performance should become much better because the training-generation discrepancy in the prefix is removed. We conduct both automatic and human evaluation in our experiments, and our observations are two-fold: (1) We confirm that the prefix discrepancy indeed induces some level of performance loss. (2) However, the induced distortion seems to be limited, and is not incremental during the generation, which contradicts the claim of exposure bias.

One-sentence Summary: We design metrics to quantify the impact of the exposure bias problem, but find it to be only a minor problem for open-ended language generation.

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