Papers for

natural language generation developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Reinforcement learning improves open-ended content with evolving rubrics

RARE: Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Rubric Evolution for Open-Ended Generation

Abstract: Verifiable rewards have advanced reinforcement learning in mathematics and code. However, many valuable open-ended tasks share three properties: no automatic verifier of overall quality, multiple requirements to satisfy jointly, and multiple valid responses to each query. Training therefore needs feedback on requirement satisfaction across different valid responses. Rubric-based reinforcement learning provides this feedback by aggregating scores from explicit criteria. As learning progresses unevenly, some criteria become fully satisfied and lose discrimination while others remain informative. Dynamic methods revise shared rubrics or select evolving criteria to restore discrimination, but may also change useful criteria. To address this, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Rubric Evolution (RARE). The core idea is to use current policy feedback to guide both which criteria change and what their replacements assess. Sample-level updates replace criteria fully satisfied across current outputs with checks of remaining quality differences, retaining all other criteria and scores. Within this rule, we compare rewarding desirable qualities with penalizing observed flaws. Video script generation exemplifies these properties and supports content production. Its demands for coherent, executable narratives under constraints make it a challenging testbed. Targeting flaws performs best across three video types with a mean gain of 3.82 points over matched static rubrics. Model and human preferences support these gains. Improvements also extend to writing and general generation benchmarks.

Sun 18 OctComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
Some tasks, like writing stories or videos, are hard to judge automatically because there's no single right answer and many things to consider. The authors introduce a way for AI to learn better by changing how it scores these tasks as it gets better, focusing on what still needs improvement. This method, called RARE, adjusts the scoring criteria dynamically, helping the AI improve more than fixed scoring rules. They tested it on generating video scripts and other tasks, showing better performance and preferences from humans.
Open → 2610.25434v1

Speculative decoding improves throughput when acceptance gains outweigh costs

When Does Better Acceptance Pay? A Controlled Study of Speculative Decoding

Abstract: The throughput gains of speculative decoding depend on the trade-off between acceptance length and execution latency. We ask when additional acceptance is worth the cost of obtaining it. We establish a comparison protocol spanning training, inference, and evaluation, remeasuring released checkpoints and retraining six drafter recipes on shared target-generated data across ten benchmarks and two target models. Alignment changes the picture: gaps that appear large in published comparisons shrink substantially under shared training and inference conditions. This narrowing motivates two deeper questions: how is acceptance improved at different costs, and when do these gains improve throughput? We find that acceptance can be improved through nearly free objective and context changes or more expensive token-to-token conditioning. DCore illustrates the former route as a strong baseline with little additional measured drafting overhead. The payoff is conditional: task uncertainty and serving conditions affect acceptance returns, execution costs, and the preferred drafter and budget. These findings inform future drafter design and deployment choices.

Sun 18 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Speculative decoding helps language models generate text faster by guessing parts of the output ahead of time. The authors studied when making these guesses more accurate actually leads to faster results overall. They found that improving guess accuracy can be cheap or expensive, and whether it's worth it depends on how uncertain the task is and the conditions of serving the model. Their work helps guide choosing and designing fast decoding methods based on specific needs and costs.
Open → 2610.24993v1

Optimal decoding for large language models uses tilted temperature sampling

The Optimal Decoder is Tilted Temperature

Abstract: Larger sample budgets benefit from higher sampling temperatures in LLMs, but what temperature tuning optimizes and why it works remain poorly understood. We seek to answer these questions: we pose decoding as pass@$k$ maximization subject to two constraints that encode critical decoding failure modes: an entropy floor preventing diversity collapse, and a cross-entropy ceiling preventing implausibility. We prove that this maximization takes the form of a single closed-form conditional sampling rule, the \emph{tilted temperature} $q^\star \propto \bigl(p e^{ηV}\bigr)^{1/T}$. Here, the tilt comes from a verifier potential $V$ that quantifies how likely a partial generation is to eventually pass. Ordinary temperature sampling, verifier-greedy decoding, and reward-tilted policies represent special cases. We further show that, under a natural rule for scaling the diversity budget with sample size $k$, the resulting optimal temperature increases with $k$, turning empirical choice into a theorem. The optimum still needs the unknown verifier potential, which we estimate using two design approaches. In the online setting, our J-EOS algorithm jointly tracks the two constraint multipliers and learns the verifier potential from binary pass/ fail feedback alone. In the offline setting, we show that when the model is calibrated, its log-probability tracks correctness up to an affine map. Under this condition, the tilt collapses into the exponent and the optimum reduces to ordinary temperature sampling. Calibrated Temperature Decoding (CTD) then fits one scalar offline and samples with zero additional inference-time overhead relative to temperature sampling. Building on these decision rules, we design a practical decoding algorithm for code generation and evaluate it alongside CTD on benchmarks including HumanEval and MBPP, showing improvements over standard and adaptive decoding baselines.

Sat 10 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Choosing the right temperature in language model sampling affects how well generated outputs perform, especially as you take more samples. The authors figured out the best way to adjust this 'temperature' by balancing two things: keeping enough variety so outputs don't all look the same, and making sure outputs are plausible. They developed a formula called tilted temperature that adapts based on how likely a partial output is to succeed. They also created methods to estimate this formula either during generation or from past data, improving code generation accuracy over standard techniques.
Open → 2610.15058v1

Arabic poetry generation controlled by meaning meter and length

Shaer: Controlled Arabic Poetry Generation with Meter Subform and Semantic Conditioning

Abstract: Classical Arabic poetry generation requires simultaneously satisfying semantic, linguistic, and fine-grained prosodic constraints. Existing systems typically control broad poetic attributes but do not jointly model semantic intent, meter subform, and poem length. We present Shaer, a controllable Classical Arabic poetry generation framework jointly conditioned on natural-language descriptions, meter subforms, and target hemistich counts. To support this task, we construct an enriched corpus of 116,032 classical Arabic poems derived from Ashaar, containing normalized meter-subform labels and automatically generated, validated semantic descriptions. We then adapt Yehia-7B using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning with a completion-only objective. Our evaluation combines automatic assessment of base-meter conformity, requested-subform adherence, and length control with three LLM judges, blinded human evaluation, and memorization analysis. Shaer achieves 95.17% base-meter accuracy, 91.75% poem-level meter-subform accuracy, and 83.40% exact count accuracy. Relative to its untuned foundation model, these results represent gains of 68.68, 57.77, and 38.93 percentage points, respectively; Shaer also attains the highest base-meter accuracy among all evaluated systems. Multi-LLM evaluation and a blinded human assessment of top-ranked outputs further indicate competitive semantic and literary quality. Finally, analysis of all 3,481 test generations finds no exact copies from the training corpus or paired source poems. Code, models, and datasets are publicly available.

Wed 7 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Generating classical Arabic poetry is tricky because it must follow strict rules about meaning, language, rhythm, and length. The authors created Shaer, a system that can generate poems by carefully controlling the poem’s theme, the specific rhythm pattern, and the number of lines. They built a large dataset of Arabic poems labeled with these details and trained a specialized language model that performs well in meeting all these constraints. Tests show Shaer creates poems that closely follow the poetic rules and fit requested themes better than previous models.
Open → 2610.09756v1

DBpedia triple filtering improves data precision for language generation

Validating DBpedia Triple Sets for Natural Language Generation

Abstract: We present a study of the quality of individual DBpedia triples from the perspective of Natural Language Generation, and propose and evaluate an approach for collecting entity-specific triple sets that filters out questionable triples while minimizing the loss of correct ones. We show in an evaluation against manually annotated data that with validation rules, it is possible to reach 98% precision in triple selection, and with improvements to a few Property definitions, it is possible to improve recall by 40% without harming precision.

Mon 7 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
When computers create sentences from data, the quality of that data matters a lot. This study looks closely at DBpedia, a big collection of facts, and finds ways to spot and remove unclear or wrong bits. The authors show their method picks correct facts with very high accuracy and can find many more right facts without adding mistakes. This helps make the sentences computers write based on this data clearer and more reliable.
Open → 2609.07589v1