An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction

We present an approach to training neural networks to generate sequences using actor-critic methods from reinforcement learning (RL). Current log-likelihood training methods are limited by the discrepancy between their training and testing modes, as models must generate tokens conditioned on their previous guesses rather than the ground-truth tokens. We address this problem by introducing a \textit{critic} network that is trained to predict the value of an output token, given the policy of an \textit{actor} network. This results in a training procedure that is much closer to the test phase, and allows us to directly optimize for a task-specific score such as BLEU. Crucially, since we leverage these techniques in the supervised learning setting rather than the traditional RL setting, we condition the critic network on the ground-truth output. We show that our method leads to improved performance on both a synthetic task, and for German-English machine translation. Our analysis paves the way for such methods to be applied in natural language generation tasks, such as machine translation, caption generation, and dialogue modelling.

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Datasets


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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Machine Translation IWSLT2014 German-English Actor-Critic [Bahdanau2017] BLEU score 28.53 # 33
Machine Translation IWSLT2015 English-German RNNsearch BLEU score 25.04 # 8
Machine Translation IWSLT2015 German-English RNNsearch BLEU score 29.98 # 9

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