text: Sequence transduction models have been widely explored in many natural language processing tasks. However, the target sequence usually consists of discrete tokens which represent word indices in a given vocabulary. We barely see the case where target sequence is composed of continuous vectors, where each vector is an element of a time series taken successively in a temporal domain. In this work, we introduce a new data set, named Action Generation Data Set (AGDS) which is specifically designed to carry out the task of caption-to-action generation. This data set contains caption-action pairs. The caption is comprised of a sequence of words describing the interactive movement between two people, and the action is a captured sequence of poses representing the movement. This data set is introduced to study the ability of generating continuous sequences through sequence transduction models. We also propose a model to innovatively combine Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) together. In our model, we have one generator to generate actions from captions and three discriminators where each of them is designed to carry out a unique functionality: caption-action consistency discriminator, pose discriminator and pose transition discriminator. This novel design allowed us to achieve plausible generation performance which is demonstrated in the experiments.
  @cite_5: This paper proposes an approach for applying GANs to NMT. We build a conditional sequence generative adversarial net which comprises of two adversarial sub models, a generator and a discriminator. The generator aims to generate sentences which are hard to be discriminated from human-translated sentences (i.e., the golden target sentences), And the discriminator makes efforts to discriminate the machine-generated sentences from human-translated ones. The two sub models play a mini-max game and achieve the win-win situation when they reach a Nash Equilibrium. Additionally, the static sentence-level BLEU is utilized as the reinforced objective for the generator, which biases the generation towards high BLEU points. During training, both the dynamic discriminator and the static BLEU objective are employed to evaluate the generated sentences and feedback the evaluations to guide the learning of the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNSearch and the newly emerged state-of-the-art Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks.
  @cite_18: We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to ½ everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.
  @cite_23: As a new way of training generative models, Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) that uses a discriminative model to guide the training of the generative model has enjoyed considerable success in generating real-valued data. However, it has limitations when the goal is for generating sequences of discrete tokens. A major reason lies in that the discrete outputs from the generative model make it difficult to pass the gradient update from the discriminative model to the generative model. Also, the discriminative model can only assess a complete sequence, while for a partially generated sequence, it is non-trivial to balance its current score and the future one once the entire sequence has been generated. In this paper, we propose a sequence generation framework, called SeqGAN, to solve the problems. Modeling the data generator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning (RL), SeqGAN bypasses the generator differentiation problem by directly performing gradient policy update. The RL reward signal comes from the GAN discriminator judged on a complete sequence, and is passed back to the intermediate state-action steps using Monte Carlo search. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real-world tasks demonstrate significant improvements over strong baselines.
  @cite_15: In this paper, we study a new learning paradigm for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Instead of maximizing the likelihood of the human translation as in previous works, we minimize the distinction between human translation and the translation given by an NMT model. To achieve this goal, inspired by the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we employ an adversarial training architecture and name it as Adversarial-NMT. In Adversarial-NMT, the training of the NMT model is assisted by an adversary, which is an elaborately designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The goal of the adversary is to differentiate the translation result generated by the NMT model from that by human. The goal of the NMT model is to produce high quality translations so as to cheat the adversary. A policy gradient method is leveraged to co-train the NMT model and the adversary. Experimental results on English @math French and German @math English translation tasks show that Adversarial-NMT can achieve significantly better translation quality than several strong baselines.
summary: Generative adversarial network (GAN) @cite_18 has also been employed to language generation task. In @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_5 , the generator is the sequence transduction model, and the discriminator is to discriminate between machine generated sequences and the human generated ones. Policy gradient update and Monte Carlo search are utilised to solve the generator differentiation problem. Moreover, teacher forcing plays a significant role in improving training stability in the adversarial training structure.