Explaining and Improving Contrastive Decoding by Extrapolating the Probabilities of a Huge and Hypothetical LM
Contrastive decoding (CD) (Li et al., 2022) improves the next-token distribution of a large expert language model (LM) using a small amateur LM. Although CD is applied to various LMs and domains to enhance open-ended text generation, it is still unclear why CD often works well, when it could fail, a…