Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Generating Poems with GPT-2 (gwern.net)
6 points by gwern on May 14, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Nice work! I was wondering if you noticed changes in the output coherence during training?

I fine-tuned it on the corpus of The Office quotes [1] and I noticed that a loss of around 0.9 gives me the most 'humorous' outputs. This may be subjective but I think for comedy the surprise plays a huge role and for longer training (and loss around 0.4) it feels overly unsurprising and therefore less funny. I also tried sampling with temperatures >1 but then it just goes crazy (e.g. some outputs are completely in Latin).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bmn0og/p_l...


I get a lot of Latin and Spanish in mine but I think that's because they actually are represented in the poetry corpus. Not too surprising that the regular GPT-2s are also exposed to a lot of foreign language, as Reddit is not a strictly anglophone website, and that it'll remember despite some finetuning (there are so many parameters in it, after all).

I do look at the training samples but I've never noticed a worsening of 'coherence' in the samples, so to speak. I wonder if that what overfitting looks like? My PG corpus is so large that the GPT-2s struggle to converge, much less overfit, so I don't know what overfitting would look like. You could try using the new pseudo-validation loss checking feature nshepperd added to see if there's any connection between the validation loss and your perception of coherence.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: