arXiv:2507.00425cs.LGcs.CL2025-07NeurIPS被引 7

用连续空间建模语言,突破传统文本生成限制。

Flexible Language Modeling in Continuous Space with Transformer-based Autoregressive Flows

  • 将语言建模从离散词元转为连续潜空间,用Transformer流模型实现。
  • 支持双向上下文、分块生成和多轮迭代,灵活度显著提升。
  • 适合需要高度可控生成的场景,如内容编辑与风格迁移。

自回归模型在语言建模中取得了显著进展,但其依赖离散词元、单向上下文和单次解码的设计也限制了灵活性。本文提出TarFlowLM框架,将语言建模从离散词元空间转向连续潜空间,采用基于Transformer的自回归归一化流来建模这些连续表示。该方法可实现堆叠的交替方向自回归变换,捕捉全局双向上下文;支持灵活的分块生成(任意补丁大小);并实现层次化的多轮生成过程。我们还设计了新的混合耦合变换,以捕捉由离散数据塑造的复杂潜空间依赖关系,并建立了与传统离散自回归模型的理论联系。在多个语言建模基准上的实验表明,该框架具备强大的似然性能,充分展现了其灵活建模能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Autoregressive models have driven remarkable progress in language modeling. Their foundational reliance on discrete tokens, unidirectional context, and single-pass decoding, while central to their success, also inspires the exploration of a design space that could offer new axes of modeling flexibility. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm, shifting language modeling from a discrete token space to a continuous latent space. We propose a novel framework TarFlowLM, that employs transformer-based autoregressive normalizing flows to model these continuous representations. This approach unlocks substantial flexibility, enabling the construction of models that can capture global bi-directional context through stacked, alternating-direction autoregressive transformations, support block-wise generation with flexible token patch sizes, and facilitate a hierarchical multi-pass generation process. We further propose new mixture-based coupling transformations designed to capture complex dependencies within the latent space shaped by discrete data, and demonstrate theoretical connections to conventional discrete autoregressive models. Extensive experiments on language modeling benchmarks demonstrate strong likelihood performance and highlight the flexible modeling capabilities inherent in our framework.

语言建模连续表示生成灵活

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