Although BERT-based ranking models have been commonly used in commercial search engines, they are usually time-consuming for online ranking tasks. Knowledge distillation, which aims at learning a smaller model with comparable performance to a larger model, is a common strategy for reducing the online inference latency. In this paper, we investigate the effect of different loss functions for uniform-architecture distillation of BERT-based ranking models. Here "uniform-architecture" denotes that both teacher and student models are in cross-encoder architecture, while the student models include small-scaled pre-trained language models. Our experimental results reveal that the optimal distillation configuration for ranking tasks is much different than general natural language processing tasks. Specifically, when the student models are in cross-encoder architecture, a pairwise loss of hard labels is critical for training student models, whereas the distillation objectives of intermediate Transformer layers may hurt performance. These findings emphasize the necessity of carefully designing a distillation strategy (for cross-encoder student models) tailored for document ranking with pairwise training samples.
The recent release of ChatGPT has garnered widespread recognition for its exceptional ability to generate human-like responses in dialogue. Given its usage by users from various nations and its training on a vast multilingual corpus that incorporates diverse cultural and societal norms, it is crucial to evaluate its effectiveness in cultural adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the underlying cultural background of ChatGPT by analyzing its responses to questions designed to quantify human cultural differences. Our findings suggest that, when prompted with American context, ChatGPT exhibits a strong alignment with American culture, but it adapts less effectively to other cultural contexts. Furthermore, by using different prompts to probe the model, we show that English prompts reduce the variance in model responses, flattening out cultural differences and biasing them towards American culture. This study provides valuable insights into the cultural implications of ChatGPT and highlights the necessity of greater diversity and cultural awareness in language technologies.
Detecting offensive language is a challenging task. Generalizing across different cultures and languages becomes even more challenging: besides lexical, syntactic and semantic differences, pragmatic aspects such as cultural norms and sensitivities, which are particularly relevant in this context, vary greatly. In this paper, we target Chinese offensive language detection and aim to investigate the impact of transfer learning using offensive language detection data from different cultural backgrounds, specifically Korean and English. We find that culture-specific biases in what is considered offensive negatively impact the transferability of language models (LMs) and that LMs trained on diverse cultural data are sensitive to different features in Chinese offensive language detection. In a few-shot learning scenario, however, our study shows promising prospects for non-English offensive language detection with limited resources. Our findings highlight the importance of cross-cultural transfer learning in improving offensive language detection and promoting inclusive digital spaces.
Recently published graph neural networks (GNNs) show promising performance at social event detection tasks. However, most studies are oriented toward monolingual data in languages with abundant training samples. This has left the more common multilingual settings and lesser-spoken languages relatively unexplored. Thus, we present a GNN that incorporates cross-lingual word embeddings for detecting events in multilingual data streams. The first exploit is to make the GNN work with multilingual data. For this, we outline a construction strategy that aligns messages in different languages at both the node and semantic levels. Relationships between messages are established by merging entities that are the same but are referred to in different languages. Non-English message representations are converted into English semantic space via the cross-lingual word embeddings. The resulting message graph is then uniformly encoded by a GNN model. In special cases where a lesser-spoken language needs to be detected, a novel cross-lingual knowledge distillation framework, called CLKD, exploits prior knowledge learned from similar threads in English to make up for the paucity of annotated data. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show the framework to be highly effective at detection in both multilingual data and in languages where training samples are scarce.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Contextual word representations derived from pre-trained bidirectional language models (biLMs) have recently been shown to provide significant improvements to the state of the art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, many questions remain as to how and why these models are so effective. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study of how the choice of neural architecture (e.g. LSTM, CNN, or self attention) influences both end task accuracy and qualitative properties of the representations that are learned. We show there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy, but all architectures learn high quality contextual representations that outperform word embeddings for four challenging NLP tasks. Additionally, all architectures learn representations that vary with network depth, from exclusively morphological based at the word embedding layer through local syntax based in the lower contextual layers to longer range semantics such coreference at the upper layers. Together, these results suggest that unsupervised biLMs, independent of architecture, are learning much more about the structure of language than previously appreciated.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
Video captioning is the task of automatically generating a textual description of the actions in a video. Although previous work (e.g. sequence-to-sequence model) has shown promising results in abstracting a coarse description of a short video, it is still very challenging to caption a video containing multiple fine-grained actions with a detailed description. This paper aims to address the challenge by proposing a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for video captioning, where a high-level Manager module learns to design sub-goals and a low-level Worker module recognizes the primitive actions to fulfill the sub-goal. With this compositional framework to reinforce video captioning at different levels, our approach significantly outperforms all the baseline methods on a newly introduced large-scale dataset for fine-grained video captioning. Furthermore, our non-ensemble model has already achieved the state-of-the-art results on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.