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Open-Domain Text Evaluation via Contrastive Distribution Methods

Authors

Sidi Lu, Hongyi Liu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Tianlu Wang, and Nanyun Peng

Overview

Contrastive Distribution Methods, or CDM, use the gap between a stronger and a weaker language model as a signal for text quality. The framework provides a reference-free alternative for evaluating open-ended generation.

Generative CDM uses the distributional contrast to create negative examples for training discriminator-based metrics. Discriminative CDM directly aggregates differences between the two models’ token-level probabilities into an instance-level score.

Results

Experiments on multi-turn dialogue coherence and commonsense evaluation for controllable generation show that CDM correlates with human judgments more strongly than existing automatic metrics across the evaluated datasets.

Paper

PMLR · OpenReview

Status

ICML 2024 Poster.

Citation

Sidi Lu, Hongyi Liu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Tianlu Wang, and Nanyun Peng. “Open-Domain Text Evaluation via Contrastive Distribution Methods.” Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 235:33057–33068, 2024.