语言模型如何对于一个给定输入生成相应的输出呢？答案是使用解码策略(decoding strategy)。这里对现有的解码策略做一个记录。

解码方法

与huggingface的how to generate 一样，用流行的transformers包和GPT2模型来对各个解码方法测试生成效果，先加载模型：

# transformers的安装命令： pip install -q transformers
# 导入对象
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch# 确定推理设备
torch_device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"# 加载分词器，第一次调用会先下载
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("gpt2")# 加载模型，第一次调用会先下载
# add the EOS token as PAD token to avoid warnings
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("gpt2", pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id).to(torch_device)

Greedy Search

Greedy Search贪心搜索就是在每个时间步，都选择概率最大的词汇作为下一个词。比如下面的图片，从词"The"开始，算法先贪心的选择概率最大的词"nice"，接着选择概率最大的"women"。

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，不指定参数的话，默认就是使用贪心搜索。

# encode context the generation is conditioned on
model_inputs = tokenizer('I enjoy playing badminton', return_tensors='pt').to(torch_device)# generate 40 new tokens
greedy_output = model.generate(**model_inputs, max_new_tokens=40)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(greedy_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton, but I'm not a big fan of the idea of playing badminton. I think it's a bit too much of a distraction. I think it's a distraction that's not going to

• 贪心搜索得到的最终序列不一定是最优的句子，因为最优的句子的前面的词的概率可能会比较低，但是句子整体的概率更高。就像上面图片中的[‘the’, ‘dog’, ‘has’] 的概率比[‘the’, ‘nice’, ‘women’]要高。
• 从上面的示例结果中发现生成的内容有重复，这是语言模型生成存在的一个问题，在贪心搜索和beam search中会更常见。
• 使用LLM生成结果时，有一个Temperature参数，比如openai 的 api ，当Temperature=0时就是使用的贪心搜索。

Beam Search

因为贪心搜索每次选择概率最大的词可能会错过整体概率更高的句子；为了减轻这个风险，Beam Search 通过在每个时间步保留num_beams个概率最高的词，最终选择整体概率最大的句子。

下面的图片示意了num_beams=2的情形：

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，使num_beams>1并且do_sample=False（默认即为False)，就是使用的beam search方法。

# activate beam search and early_stopping
beam_output = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,num_beams=5,early_stopping=True
)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(beam_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badm

我们也可以尝试将beam search 生成的句子都打印出来(用参数return_num_sequences，注意要小于等于num_beams)，可以发现生成的几个句子差别不太大。

# set return_num_sequences > 1
beam_outputs = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,num_beams=5,num_return_sequences=5,early_stopping=True
)# now we have 5 output sequences
print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
for i, beam_output in enumerate(beam_outputs):print("{}: {}".format(i, tokenizer.decode(beam_output, skip_special_tokens=True)))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0: I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badm
1: I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I like to play badminton.
2: I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play goodm
3: I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I like to play badminton."
4: I enjoy playing badminton, but I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I don't like to play badminton. I like to play badminton,

• Beam Search 可以保证比贪心搜索生成概率更高的句子，但是仍然不能保证找到最有可能的句子。
• Beam Search的重复句子生成可以用n-grams惩罚来减轻，n-gram惩罚保证每个n-gram不会出现两次，方法是如果看到当前候选词与其上文所组成的 n-gram 已经出现过了，就将该候选词的概率设置为 0 。transformers包可以使用参数no_repeat_ngram_size，no_repeat_ngram_size=2就是任意2-gram不会出现两次。
• 在机器翻译或摘要等任务中，因为所需生成的文本长度或多或少都是可预测的，所以beam search效果比较好 - 参见 Murray et al. (2018) 和 Yang et al. (2018)的工作。但开放域文本生成情况有所不同，其输出文本长度可能会有很大差异，如对话和故事生成的输出文本长度就有很大不同。

sampling

采样就意味着不确定性，它根据当前条件概率分布随机选择下一个词。也就是每一个单词都有一定的几率会被选择，比如上面的图片中的例子，可视化出来就如下图，单词”car"从条件概率分布P(w|"The")中被采样到，接下来"drive"从P(w|"the", "car")被采样。

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，使do_sample=True且top_k=0，就是使用采样方式解码：

# set seed to reproduce results. Feel free to change the seed though to get different results
from transformers import set_seed
set_seed(42)# activate sampling and deactivate top_k by setting top_k sampling to 0
sample_output = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,do_sample=True,top_k=0
)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(sample_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton more than any other sport. I know more about winning than any other athlete and coach would agree, it's a lot tougher than most other AC athletes. American hockey SalariesThe Miami Dolphins

• sampling 方法的问题模型可能会生成一些不太连贯的胡言乱语

Temperature Sampling

我们知道softmax的表达式如下式
$$p_i=\frac{exp(z_i)}{{\sum }_{j=1}^{N}exp(z_j)}$$
而带Temperature的softmax的表达式如下式：
$$p_i=\frac{exp(z_i/\tau )}{{\sum }_{j=1}^{N}exp(z_j/\tau )}$$

Temperature=1时就是普通的softmax，加了temperature之后可以让原本的概率分布更加两级分化(Temperature<1)或更平缓(Temperature>1)。

用如下代码生成的下图可以直观感受一下Temperature的效果：

import math
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import torchdef softmax(vec, temperature):"""turn vec into normalized probability"""sum_exp = sum(math.exp(x/temperature) for x in vec)return [math.exp(x/temperature)/sum_exp for x in vec]def main():vec = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]ts = [0.1, 0.3, 0.6, 1, 1.5, 10, 100, 10000]for t in ts:result = softmax(vec, t)print(t, result)plt.plot(result, label=t)plt.legend()plt.show()if __name__ == "__main__":main()

-----------输出结果-----------------------
0.1 [8.193640616392913e-40, 1.8047694477191753e-35, 3.975269250769863e-31, 8.75611321772293e-27, 1.9286622828562907e-22, 4.2481613803067925e-18, 9.357198133414645e-14, 2.0610600462088695e-09, 4.5397868608862414e-05, 0.9999546000702376]
0.3 [9.023799189303686e-14, 2.5295175399808997e-12, 7.090648684486909e-11, 1.987624041824023e-09, 5.5716331571752974e-08, 1.5618193071184212e-06, 4.37803329701724e-05, 0.0012272338715773265, 0.034401359545912634, 0.964326006652751]
0.6 [2.48124849643664e-07, 1.3136945477127512e-06, 6.9553427122218854e-06, 3.682499278746801e-05, 0.00019496955792188005, 0.0010322643845619335, 0.00546531351351773, 0.028936048020019006, 0.15320161834191354, 0.811124444027169]
1 [7.801341612780742e-05, 0.00021206245143623275, 0.0005764455082375902, 0.0015669413501390804, 0.004259388198344144, 0.0115782175399118, 0.031472858344688034, 0.08555209892803112, 0.23255471590259755, 0.6321492583604866]
1.5 [0.0012076552782540224, 0.002352191295314716, 0.0045814430569569645, 0.008923432599188675, 0.017380473436496794, 0.03385253976191134, 0.06593574407043169, 0.12842529324824872, 0.25013831539204334, 0.4872029118611537]
10 [0.06120702456008912, 0.0676442235257524, 0.07475842861647011, 0.08262084118795704, 0.09131015090787675, 0.10091332330848407, 0.11152647016690201, 0.12325581142409142, 0.136218738269722, 0.150544988032655]
100 [0.09556032473672185, 0.09652072196694327, 0.09749077134979559, 0.09847056989102544, 0.09946021557130351, 0.10045980735602247, 0.10146944520519384, 0.10248923008344388, 0.10351926397011023, 0.10455964986943994]
10000 [0.09995500600033737, 0.0999650020007291, 0.09997499900077084, 0.09998499700056258, 0.09999499600020427, 0.10000499599979594, 0.10001499699943757, 0.10002499899922916, 0.10003500199927076, 0.10004500599966237]

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，使do_sample=True时，可以设置Temperature参数(默认值为1)，比如使temperature=0.6：

# set seed to reproduce results. Feel free to change the seed though to get different results
from transformers import set_seed
set_seed(42)# activate sampling and deactivate top_k by setting top_k sampling to 0
sample_output = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,do_sample=True,top_k=0,temperature=0.6
)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(sample_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to play against the best players from the world."I'm looking forward to the challenge of playing against some of the best players from the country

• 可以发现将Temperature降低(例子从1变成0.6)后，因为将分布变得更两极化(增加高概率单词的可能性，降低低概率词的可能性)，所以这次的生成内容更连贯了。如果还是用前一节的可视化例子的话，示意图类似如下

  

• 当设置$Temperature\to 0$时temperature采样也就等同于贪心搜索，比如在LLAMA代码中temperature=0时就是用的贪心搜索

top-k sampling

论文《Hierarchical Neural Story Generation》中提出top-k sampling方法 ，它在每个时间步先选出K个最可能的下一个词，将它们的概率进行缩放调整后在这K个词中进行采样。在GPT-2的论文中生成故事的时候就是使用的top-k采样方法。

将前面的例子中的下一个词从3个扩展到10个来可视化top-k sampling，设k=6，如下图所示：

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，使do_sample=True且top_k>0，就是使用top-k采样方式解码:

# set seed to reproduce results. Feel free to change the seed though to get different results
set_seed(42)# set top_k to 50
sample_output = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,do_sample=True,top_k=50
)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(sample_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton more than any other sport. I know more about winning than any other athlete and I would much rather spend my time here. I play much more than most American hockey players and I appreciate the community.

• top-k 采样的结果看起来更自然

• top-k采样的问题是因为不能动态调整单词的个数，有时候会像上图右图一样包括一些不太适合的词。

Top-p (nucleus) sampling

top-p采样方法出自论文《The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration》, 它在每个时间步，选出累积概率和超过概率p的最小单词集，将它们的概率进行缩放调整后在这个单词集中进行采样。这样得到的单词集的大小会根据下一个词的概率分布动态增加或减少。

比如如果设p=0.92，与前面top-k采样中同样的例子，如下图所示进行采样的候选词集是不一样的

如果使用transformers的generate函数来生成文本，使do_sample=True且0<top_p<1，就是使用top-p采样方式解码:

# set seed to reproduce results. Feel free to change the seed though to get different results
set_seed(42)# set top_p to 0.92
sample_output = model.generate(**model_inputs,max_new_tokens=40,do_sample=True,top_p=0.92,top_k=0
)print("Output:\n" + 100 * '-')
print(tokenizer.decode(sample_output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Output:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoy playing badminton more than any other sport. I know more about winning than any other athlete and coach would agree, it's a lot tougher than most other sports because everyone is playing badminton. So I'm

在LLAMA的生成代码中，top-p的实现如下：

def sample_top_p(probs, p):"""Perform top-p (nucleus) sampling on a probability distribution.Args:probs (torch.Tensor): Probability distribution tensor.p (float): Probability threshold for top-p sampling.Returns:torch.Tensor: Sampled token indices.Note:Top-p sampling selects the smallest set of tokens whose cumulative probability massexceeds the threshold p. The distribution is renormalized based on the selected tokens."""probs_sort, probs_idx = torch.sort(probs, dim=-1, descending=True)probs_sum = torch.cumsum(probs_sort, dim=-1)mask = probs_sum - probs_sort > pprobs_sort[mask] = 0.0probs_sort.div_(probs_sort.sum(dim=-1, keepdim=True))next_token = torch.multinomial(probs_sort, num_samples=1)next_token = torch.gather(probs_idx, -1, next_token)return next_token

Contrastive search

待学习总结，可参考huggingface blog。

总结

每种解码方法各有优点，都有适应的场景，可根据实际测试情况选择最适合自己的方法。

相关资源

1. huggingface transformers关于文本生成的文档：

   • how to generate （本文笔记中的大部分代码和图片来自此文）
   • 生成相关文档的GitHub issue讨论
   • transformers里的解码策略
   • transformers 文本生成相关的类的说明文档

2. https://nn.labml.ai/sampling/index.html

3. https://finisky.github.io/illustrated-decoding-strategies/

4. https://blog.csdn.net/muyao987/article/details/125917234

5. openai 的 api文档