Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
Thomas Scialom, Paul-Alexis Dray, Jacopo Staiano, Sylvain Lamprier, Benjamin Piwowarski
Due to the discrete nature of words, language GANs require to be optimized from rewards provided by discriminator networks, via reinforcement learning methods. This is a much harder setting than for continuous tasks, which enjoy gradient flows from discriminators to generators, usually leading to dramatic learning instabilities. However, we claim that this can be solved by making discriminator and generator networks cooperate to produce output sequences during training. These cooperative outputs, inherently built to obtain higher discrimination scores, not only provide denser rewards for training but also form a more compact artificial set for discriminator training, hence improving its accuracy and stability.In this paper, we show that our SelfGAN framework, built on this cooperative principle, outperforms Teacher Forcing and obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging tasks, Summarization and Question Generation.