Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (short as MoE) architecture has achieved remarkable success in increasing the model capacity of large-scale language models. However, MoE requires incorporating significantly more parameters than the base model being extended. In this paper, we propose building a parameter-efficient MoE architecture by sharing information across experts. We adopt the matrix product operator (MPO, a tensor decomposition from quantum many-body physics) to reconstruct the parameter matrix in the expert layer and increase model capacity for pre-trained language models by sharing parameters of the central tensor (containing the core information) among different experts while enabling the specificity through the auxiliary tensors (complementing the central tensor) of different experts. To address the unbalanced optimization issue, we further design the gradient mask strategy for the MPO-based MoE architecture. Extensive experiments based on T5 and GPT-2 show improved performance and efficiency of the pre-trained language model (27.2x reduction in total parameters for the superior model performance, compared with the Switch Transformers). Our code is publicly available at \url{//github.com/RUCAIBox/MPO/MPOE}.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (PEFTs) offer the promise of adapting large pre-trained models while only tuning a small number of parameters. They have been shown to be competitive with full model fine-tuning for many downstream tasks. However, prior work indicates that PEFTs may not work as well for machine translation (MT), and there is no comprehensive study showing when PEFTs work for MT. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of PEFTs for MT, considering (1) various parameter budgets, (2) a diverse set of language-pairs, and (3) different pre-trained models. We find that 'adapters', in which small feed-forward networks are added after every layer, are indeed on par with full model fine-tuning when the parameter budget corresponds to 10% of total model parameters. Nevertheless, as the number of tuned parameters decreases, the performance of PEFTs decreases. The magnitude of this decrease depends on the language pair, with PEFTs particularly struggling for distantly related language-pairs. We find that using PEFTs with a larger pre-trained model outperforms full fine-tuning with a smaller model, and for smaller training data sizes, PEFTs outperform full fine-tuning for the same pre-trained model.
Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. While these models are known to be able to jointly represent many different languages, their training data is dominated by English, potentially limiting their cross-lingual generalization. In this work, we train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages, and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities in a wide range of tasks. Our largest model with 7.5 billion parameters sets new state of the art in few-shot learning in more than 20 representative languages, outperforming GPT-3 of comparable size in multilingual commonsense reasoning (with +7.4% absolute accuracy improvement in 0-shot settings and +9.4% in 4-shot settings) and natural language inference (+5.4% in each of 0-shot and 4-shot settings). On the FLORES-101 machine translation benchmark, our model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples, while surpassing the official supervised baseline in 45 directions. We conduct an in-depth analysis of different multilingual prompting approaches, showing in particular that strong few-shot learning performance across languages can be achieved via cross-lingual transfer through both templates and demonstration examples. Finally, we evaluate our models in social value tasks such as hate speech detection in five languages and find it has limitations similar to comparable sized GPT-3 models.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been deployed in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks and in various domains. Language model pre-training from general or mixed domain rich data plus fine-tuning using small amounts of available data in a low resource domain demonstrated beneficial results by researchers. In this work, we question this statement and verify if BERT-based PLMs from the biomedical domain can perform well in clinical text mining tasks via fine-tuning. We test the state-of-the-art models, i.e. Bioformer which is pre-trained on a large amount of biomedical data from PubMed corpus. We use a historical n2c2 clinical NLP challenge dataset for fine-tuning its task-adapted version (BioformerApt), and show that their performances are actually very low. We also present our own end-to-end model, TransformerCRF, which is developed using Transformer and conditional random fields (CRFs) as encoder and decoder. We further create a new variation model by adding a CRF layer on top of PLM Bioformer (BioformerCRF). We investigate the performances of TransformerCRF on clinical text mining tasks by training from scratch using a limited amount of data, as well as the model BioformerCRF. Experimental evaluation shows that, in a \textit{constrained setting}, all tested models are \textit{far from ideal} regarding extreme low-frequency special token recognition, even though they can achieve relatively higher accuracy on overall text tagging. Our models including source codes will be hosted at \url{//github.com/poethan/TransformerCRF}.
In this paper, we propose a general architecture for designing language servers for hybrid modeling languages, that is, modeling languages that contain both textual and graphical representations. The architecture consists of a textual language server, a graphical language server, and a client that communicates with the two servers. The servers are implemented using the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and the Graphical Language Server Protocol (GLSP) and are based on a shared abstract syntax of the hybrid language. This means that only static resources need to be common between the graphical and textual language servers. The servers' separation allows each to be developed and maintained independently, while also enabling forward-compatibility with their respective dependencies. We describe a prototype implementation of our architecture in the form of a hybrid editor for the UML-RT language. The evaluation of the architecture via this prototype gives us useful insight into further generalization of the architecture and the way it is used. We then sketch a suitable extension of the architecture to enable support for multiple diagram types and, thus, multiple graphical views.
BERT has shown a lot of sucess in a wide variety of NLP tasks. But it has a limitation dealing with long inputs due to its attention mechanism. Longformer, ETC and BigBird addressed this issue and effectively solved the quadratic dependency problem. However we find that these models are not sufficient, and propose LittleBird, a novel model based on BigBird with improved speed and memory footprint while maintaining accuracy. In particular, we devise a more flexible and efficient position representation method based on Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi). We also show that replacing the method of global information represented in the BigBird with pack and unpack attention is more effective. The proposed model can work on long inputs even after being pre-trained on short inputs, and can be trained efficiently reusing existing pre-trained language model for short inputs. This is a significant benefit for low-resource languages where large amounts of long text data are difficult to obtain. As a result, our experiments show that LittleBird works very well in a variety of languages, achieving high performance in question answering tasks, particularly in KorQuAD2.0, Korean Question Answering Dataset for long paragraphs.
Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of transformer-based models with the same amount of text and the same training steps. The experimental results shows that the most improvement upon the origin BERT is adding the RNN-layer to capture more contextual information for short text understanding. But there are no remarkable improvement for short text understanding for similar BERT structures.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website //pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.