@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2020-revisiting,
title = "Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling",
author = "Zhang, Zhong and
Gao, Chongming and
Xu, Cong and
Miao, Rui and
Yang, Qinli and
Shao, Junming",
editor = "Cohn, Trevor and
He, Yulan and
Liu, Yang",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.46",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.46",
pages = "518--527",
abstract = "Weight tying is now a common setting in many language generation tasks such as language modeling and machine translation. However, a recent study reveals that there is a potential flaw in weight tying. They find that the learned word embeddings are likely to degenerate and lie in a narrow cone when training a language model. They call it the representation degeneration problem and propose a cosine regularization to solve it. Nevertheless, we prove that the cosine regularization is insufficient to solve the problem, as the degeneration is still likely to happen under certain conditions. In this paper, we revisit the representation degeneration problem and theoretically analyze the limitations of the previously proposed solution. Afterward, we propose an alternative regularization method called Laplacian regularization to tackle the problem. Experiments on language modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Laplacian regularization.",
}
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<abstract>Weight tying is now a common setting in many language generation tasks such as language modeling and machine translation. However, a recent study reveals that there is a potential flaw in weight tying. They find that the learned word embeddings are likely to degenerate and lie in a narrow cone when training a language model. They call it the representation degeneration problem and propose a cosine regularization to solve it. Nevertheless, we prove that the cosine regularization is insufficient to solve the problem, as the degeneration is still likely to happen under certain conditions. In this paper, we revisit the representation degeneration problem and theoretically analyze the limitations of the previously proposed solution. Afterward, we propose an alternative regularization method called Laplacian regularization to tackle the problem. Experiments on language modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Laplacian regularization.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling
%A Zhang, Zhong
%A Gao, Chongming
%A Xu, Cong
%A Miao, Rui
%A Yang, Qinli
%A Shao, Junming
%Y Cohn, Trevor
%Y He, Yulan
%Y Liu, Yang
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
%D 2020
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F zhang-etal-2020-revisiting
%X Weight tying is now a common setting in many language generation tasks such as language modeling and machine translation. However, a recent study reveals that there is a potential flaw in weight tying. They find that the learned word embeddings are likely to degenerate and lie in a narrow cone when training a language model. They call it the representation degeneration problem and propose a cosine regularization to solve it. Nevertheless, we prove that the cosine regularization is insufficient to solve the problem, as the degeneration is still likely to happen under certain conditions. In this paper, we revisit the representation degeneration problem and theoretically analyze the limitations of the previously proposed solution. Afterward, we propose an alternative regularization method called Laplacian regularization to tackle the problem. Experiments on language modeling demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Laplacian regularization.
%R 10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.46
%U https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.46
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.46
%P 518-527
Markdown (Informal)
[Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling](https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.46) (Zhang et al., Findings 2020)
ACL