FANTAstic SEquences and Where to Find Them: Faithful and Efficient API Call Generation through State-tracked Constrained Decoding and Reranking

Zhuoer Wang, Leonardo Ribeiro, Alexandros Papangelis, Rohan Mukherjee, Tzu-Yen Wang, Xinyan Zhao, Arijit Biswas, James Caverlee, Angeliki Metallinou


Abstract
API call generation is the cornerstone of large language models’ tool-using ability that provides access to the larger world. However, existing supervised and in-context learning approaches suffer from high training costs, poor data efficiency, and generated API calls that can be unfaithful to the API documentation and the user’s request. To address these limitations, we propose an output-side optimization approach called FANTASE. Two of the unique contributions of FANTASE are its State-Tracked Constrained Decoding (SCD) and Reranking components. SCD dynamically incorporates appropriate API constraints in the form of Token Search Trie for efficient and guaranteed generation faithfulness with respect to the API documentation. The Reranking component efficiently brings in the supervised signal by leveraging a lightweight model as the discriminator to rerank the beam-searched candidate generations of the large language model. We demonstrate the superior performance of FANTASE in API call generation accuracy, inference efficiency, and context efficiency with DSTC8 and API Bank datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.359
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6179–6191
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.359
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Zhuoer Wang, Leonardo Ribeiro, Alexandros Papangelis, Rohan Mukherjee, Tzu-Yen Wang, Xinyan Zhao, Arijit Biswas, James Caverlee, and Angeliki Metallinou. 2024. FANTAstic SEquences and Where to Find Them: Faithful and Efficient API Call Generation through State-tracked Constrained Decoding and Reranking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 6179–6191, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FANTAstic SEquences and Where to Find Them: Faithful and Efficient API Call Generation through State-tracked Constrained Decoding and Reranking (Wang et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.359.pdf