See also Decoding.

• Murray & Chiang 2018 - Correcting Length Bias in Neural Machine Translation
• Nucleus Sampling: Holtzman et al 2019 - The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration
• Wellek et al 2019 - Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training
• Stahlberg & Byrne 2019 - On NMT Search Errors and Model Errors: Cat Got Your Tongue? Exact decoding method for seq2seq models. Follow-up work: Shi et al 2020 - Why Neural Machine Translation Prefers Empty Outputs
• Meister et al 2020 - If beam search is the answer, what was the question?
• Hargreaves et al 2021 - Incremental Beam Manipulation for Natural Language Generation
• Diverse k-Best and Lattice Decoding
  • Xu & Durrett 2021 - Massive-scale Decoding for Text Generation using Lattices Produces a lattice of diverse generated outputs
• Constrained Decoding
  • Yin & Neubig 2017 - A Syntactic Neural Model for General-Purpose Code Generation
  • Wang et al 2020 - RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers
  • Scholak et al 2021 - PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models
  • Poesia et al 2022 - Synchromesh: Reliable Code Generation from Pre-trained Language Models They created a tool that will take a ANTLR parser and a string, and give you the set of valid next token completions (see sect 3.1).
  • Geng et al 2023 - Grammar-Constrained Decoding for Structured NLP Tasks without Finetuning Elegant solution. Uses Grammatical Framework to constrain the outputs.
  • Beurer-Kellner et al 2024 - Guiding LLMs The Right Way: Fast, Non-Invasive Constrained Generation
• Parallel Decoding
  • Santilli et al 2023 - Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding
• Speculative Decoding
  • Overviews
    • Xia et al 2024 - Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding
    • Khoshnoodi et al 2024 - A Comprehensive Survey of Accelerated Generation Techniques in Large Language Models
  • Leviathan et al 2024 - Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding
  • Sun et al 2024 - TriForce: Lossless Acceleration of Long Sequence Generation with Hierarchical Speculative Decoding
  • Yang et al 2025 - LongSpec: Long-Context Speculative Decoding with Efficient Drafting and Verification
  • Cha et al 2025 - SpecExtend: A Drop-in Enhancement for Speculative Decoding of Long Sequences
• Miscellaneous Decoding Techniques
  • Contrastive Decoding
    • Waldendorf et al 2024 - Contrastive Decoding Reduces Hallucinations in Large Multilingual Machine Translation Models

• Shi et al 2016 - Why Neural Translations are the Right Length
• Murray & Chiang 2018 - Correcting Length Bias in Neural Machine Translation
• Shi et al 2020 - Why Neural Machine Translation Prefers Empty Outputs If you add a different EOS token for each length, and do not perform label smoothing on the EOS tokens, then the empty-sentence and length issues go away.
• Liang et al 2022 - The Implicit Length Bias of Label Smoothing on Beam Search Decoding Introduces a method for correcting the length problem induced by label smoothing which improves translation quality.

See also this post, references at the bottom.

• Wang & Sennrich 2020 - On Exposure Bias, Hallucination and Domain Shift in Neural Machine Translation Uses minimum risk training (i.e. risk loss function), which shows a consistant improvement across models.
• He et al 2021 - Exposure Bias versus Self-Recovery: Are Distortions Really Incremental for Autoregressive Text Generation? Published here
• Arora et al 2022 - Why Exposure Bias Matters: An Imitation Learning Perspective of Error Accumulation in Language Generation Shows that exposure bias leads to an accumulation of errors during generation (such as repetition, etc), and perplexity doesn't capture this.

• Bengio et al 2015 - Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks Scheduled sampling attempts to avoid the exposure bias problem of teacher forcing by sampling predictions from the model according to a schedule during training
• Scheduled Sampling is actually DAGGER: Ross et al 2010 - A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning (see Graham Neubig's slides)
• Mihaylova & Martins 2019 - Scheduled Sampling for Transformers

• Noisy channel model: Yee et al 2019 - Simple and Effective Noisy Channel Modeling for Neural Machine Translation “noisy channel models can outperform a direct model by up to 3.2 BLEU”
• Fast Variants
  • Gehring et al 2017 - Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning 10x faster. Very strong (high BLEU score) baseline given in Edunov et al 2017.
• Non-Autoregressive, see Non-Autoregressive Seq2seq

• Standard seq2seq datasets
  • WMT 2014 & 2016 (En-De, and En-Fr)
  • Neural abstractive summarization (Rush 2015)
  • Easy dialog datasets
  • Some easy semantic parsing datasets? E2E dataset?

• Lee et al 2020 - On the Discrepancy between Density Estimation and Sequence Generation

• Generation
• Label Bias Problem
• Machine Translation
• Non-Autoregressive Seq2seq
• RNN
• Summarization