Research notesLanguage models & structured learning

Annotated bibliography

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Original formulations and the research connected to them, with complete references and direct paper links.

31 papers

2015

Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention

Kelvin Xu, Jimmy Lei Ba, Ryan Kiros, Kyunghyun Cho, Aaron Courville, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Richard S. Zemel, Yoshua Bengio · ICML 2015

Introduces deterministic soft and stochastic hard visual attention for image captioning.

2017

Structured Attention Networks

Yoon Kim, Carl Denton, Luong Hoang, Alexander M. Rush · ICLR 2017

Uses differentiable graphical-model inference to attend over subsequences and syntactic trees.

2018

Latent Alignment and Variational Attention

Yuntian Deng, Yoon Kim, Justin Chiu, Demi Guo, Alexander M. Rush · NeurIPS 2018

Models alignment as a latent variable and learns approximate posterior inference through variational attention.

2018

Learning Neural Trans-Dimensional Random Field Language Models with Noise-Contrastive Estimation

Bin Wang, Zhijian Ou · ICASSP 2018

Uses an exponentially tilted reference distribution and noise-contrastive estimation for neural random-field language models.

2018

Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Hareesh Bahuleyan, Lili Mou, Olga Vechtomova, Pascal Poupart · COLING 2018

Treats attention context vectors as Gaussian latent variables in a variational encoder-decoder.

2019

Fast Structured Decoding for Sequence Models

Zhiqing Sun, Zhuohan Li, Haoqing Wang, Di He, Zi Lin, Zhi-Hong Deng · NeurIPS 2019

Adds approximate first-order CRF inference and dynamic transitions to non-autoregressive sequence models.

2020

Bayesian Attention Modules

Xinjie Fan, Shujian Zhang, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou · NeurIPS 2020

Builds distributions over attention weights from normalized reparameterizable variables and learns them with Bayesian regularization.

2020

Cascaded Text Generation with Markov Transformers

Yuntian Deng, Alexander M. Rush · NeurIPS 2020

Higher-order CRF cascades for parallel text generation, parameterized by one Markov Transformer.

2020

Residual Energy-Based Models for Text Generation

Yuntian Deng, Anton Bakhtin, Myle Ott, Arthur Szlam, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato · ICLR 2020

Combines a fixed autoregressive language model with a learned sequence-level energy, NCE training, conditional generation by importance resampling, and likelihood bounds.

2021

OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics

Jian Guan, Zhexin Zhang, Zhuoer Feng, Zitao Liu, Wenbiao Ding, Xiaoxi Mao, Changjie Fan, Minlie Huang · ACL-IJCNLP 2021

A benchmark for testing automatic story metrics, including human correlation, generalization, robustness, and sensitivity to different coherence errors.

2021

Residual Energy-Based Models for Text

Anton Bakhtin, Yuntian Deng, Sam Gross, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, Arthur Szlam · JMLR 22(40):1–41

Studies statistical discrimination of human and model text and incorporates learned discriminators into globally normalized generation.

2021

Sequence-to-Lattice Models for Fast Translation

Yuntian Deng, Alexander M. Rush · Findings of EMNLP 2021

Candidate lookup, parallel conditional edge scoring, and exact Viterbi decoding replace a deep translation decoder.

2022

Model Criticism for Long-Form Text Generation

Yuntian Deng, Volodymyr Kuleshov, Alexander M. Rush · EMNLP 2022

A framework for evaluating high-level text structure by comparing real and generated data in latent spaces defined by explicit generative critics. Experiments study discourse coherence, coreference, and topicality.

2023

Contrast-augmented Diffusion Model with Fine-grained Sequence Alignment for Markup-to-Image Generation

Guojin Zhong, Jin Yuan, Pan Wang, Kailun Yang, Weili Guan, Zhiyong Li · ACM Multimedia 2023

FSA-CDM combines fine-grained cross-modal sequence alignment, contextual modeling, and a contrast-augmented diffusion objective for markup-to-image generation.

2023

Input Perturbation Reduces Exposure Bias in Diffusion Models

Mang Ning, Enver Sangineto, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara · ICML 2023

Studies accumulated sampling errors in diffusion models and trains with perturbed inputs to simulate inference-time prediction errors.

2023

LiveTune: Dynamic Parameter Tuning for Feedback-Driven Optimization

Soheil Zibakhsh Shabgahi, Nojan Sheybani, Aiden Tabrizi, Farinaz Koushanfar · arXiv

LiveVariables expose optimization parameters through designated system ports for real-time adjustment without restarting the optimization loop.

2023

Markup-to-Image Diffusion Models with Scheduled Sampling

Yuntian Deng, Noriyuki Kojima, Alexander M. Rush · ICLR 2023

Learns to render LaTeX, HTML table layouts, LilyPond music notation, and SMILES molecules with conditional diffusion. Scheduled sampling exposes denoisers to their own generated inputs to address compounding errors.

2023

Tree Prompting: Efficient Task Adaptation without Fine-Tuning

John X. Morris, Chandan Singh, Alexander M. Rush, Jianfeng Gao, Yuntian Deng · EMNLP 2023

Learns a reusable decision tree whose internal decisions are prompted language-model calls, with few-shot, instruction and dynamically generated prompt candidates.

2023

Augmenting interpretable models with large language models during training

Chandan Singh, Armin Askari, Rich Caruana, Jianfeng Gao · Nature Communications 14, 7913

Aug-Tree uses language-model-generated expansions to construct interpretable text features for tree splits.

2024

GPTree: Towards Explainable Decision-Making via LLM-powered Decision Trees

Sichao Xiong, Yigit Ihlamur, Fuat Alican, Aaron Ontoyin Yin · arXiv:2411.08257

Builds decision trees with LLM-assisted splits and incorporates expert feedback to revise decision paths.

2024

What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation

Dingyi Yang, Qin Jin · arXiv

A survey of story-quality criteria, human evaluation, automatic metrics, and evaluation benchmarks.

2025

ACT: Agentic Classification Tree

Vincent Grari, Tim Arni, Thibault Laugel, Sylvain Lamprier, James Zou, Marcin Detyniecki · arXiv:2509.26433

Learns classification trees of natural-language binary questions through impurity-based split selection and TextGrad refinement.

2025

Energy-Based Diffusion Language Models for Text Generation

Minkai Xu, Tomas Geffner, Karsten Kreis, Weili Nie, Yilun Xu, Jure Leskovec, Stefano Ermon, Arash Vahdat · ICLR 2025

Adds a full-sequence residual energy to each diffusion denoising distribution, with autoregressive or NCE parameterizations and parallel importance sampling.

2025

Interactive Training: Feedback-Driven Neural Network Optimization

Wentao Zhang, Yang Young Lu, Yuntian Deng · EMNLP 2025 System Demonstrations

An open-source framework in which humans and AI agents intervene in ongoing neural-network training through a control server, changing optimizer settings, training data, and model checkpoints.

2026

AI Training Manager: Bounded Closed-Loop Control of Adaptive Training Recipes

Anjali Rao, Nikhil Kamalkumar Advani · arXiv

An asynchronous LLM supervisor observes training telemetry and proposes constrained changes to a running training recipe, with experiments on deliberately induced supervised-learning and reinforcement-learning failure modes.

2026

Breaking the Factorization Barrier in Diffusion Language Models

Ian Li, Zilei Shao, Benjie Wang, Rose Yu, Guy Van den Broeck, Anji Liu · ICML 2026

CoDD composes factorized diffusion predictions with a tractable probabilistic-circuit prior to model joint token dependencies.

2026

DA-DLM: Explicitly Modeling Token Dependencies in Diffusion Language Models

Pengyu Ji, Zichen Zhang, Xiang Hu, Kewei Tu · EMNLP 2026

Adapts directed-acyclic dependency modeling to iterative diffusion using position-oriented candidate groups and fixed-token anchors.

2026

DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding

Guanghao Li, Zhihui Fu, Min Fang, Qibin Zhao, Ming Tang, Chun Yuan, Jun Wang · Findings of ACL 2026

Uses diffusion drafting, Causal-consistency Path Search over token lattices, and adaptive draft lengths.

2026

Interactive Training 2: Auditable Control Plane for Live Model Training

Wentao Zhang, Xuanhe Pan, Han Zhou, Yang Lu, Yuntian Deng · arXiv

A reusable protocol with typed settings, structured actions, application-selected control points, and an ordered journal shared by humans, scripts, and LLM controllers.

2026

LiLiCorr: Lightweight Likelihood Correlation of Parallel Drafts for Speculative Decoding

Matan Rusanovsky, Yoav Miron, Roy Uziel, Omer Belhasin, Hao Guo, Ran Zilberstein, Maor Ashkenazi, Michael Elad · arXiv 2026

Scores adjacent compatibility among top-K parallel draft candidates and selects a draft through a cheap greedy walk.

2026

Unified Energy for Invariant and Independent Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

Yuchen Yan, Minkai Xu, Zaiquan Yang, Yatao Bian · arXiv:2606.09159

Combines energy corrections for dependency and invariance in diffusion decoding.