The popularity of transformer-based text embeddings calls for better statistical tools for measuring distributions of such embeddings. One such tool would be a method for ranking texts within a corpus by centrality, i.e. assigning each text a number signifying how representative that text is of the corpus as a whole. However, an intrinsic center-outward ordering of high-dimensional text representations is not trivial. A statistical depth is a function for ranking k-dimensional objects by measuring centrality with respect to some observed k-dimensional distribution. We adopt a statistical depth to measure distributions of transformer-based text embeddings, transformer-based text embedding (TTE) depth, and introduce the practical use of this depth for both modeling and distributional inference in NLP pipelines. We first define TTE depth and an associated rank sum test for determining whether two corpora differ significantly in embedding space. We then use TTE depth for the task of in-context learning prompt selection, showing that this approach reliably improves performance over statistical baseline approaches across six text classification tasks. Finally, we use TTE depth and the associated rank sum test to characterize the distributions of synthesized and human-generated corpora, showing that five recent synthetic data augmentation processes cause a measurable distributional shift away from associated human-generated text.
This paper introduces a theory for assessing and optimizing the multiple-input-multiple-output performance of multi-port cluster antennas in terms of efficiency, channel correlation, and power distribution. A method based on a convex optimization of feeding coefficients is extended with additional constraints allowing the user to control a ratio between the power radiated by the clusters. The formulation of the problem makes it possible to simultaneously optimize total efficiency and channel correlation with a fixed ratio between power radiated by the clusters, thus examining a trade-off between these parameters. It is shown that channel correlation, total efficiency, and allocation of radiated power are mutually conflicting parameters. The trade-offs are shown and discussed. The theory is demonstrated on a four-element antenna array and on a mobile terminal antenna.
Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters and pretrained on massive amounts of data are now capable of near or better than state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream natural language processing tasks. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one such task that LLMs have been applied to with great success. However, little research has focused on applying LLMs to the more difficult subset of NMT called simultaneous translation (SimulMT), where translation begins before the entire source context is available to the model. In this paper, we address key challenges facing LLMs fine-tuned for SimulMT, validate classical SimulMT concepts and practices in the context of LLMs, explore adapting LLMs that are fine-tuned for NMT to the task of SimulMT, and introduce Simul-LLM, the first open-source fine-tuning and evaluation pipeline development framework for LLMs focused on SimulMT.
Uniformly valid inference for cointegrated vector autoregressive processes has so far proven difficult due to certain discontinuities arising in the asymptotic distribution of the least squares estimator. We extend asymptotic results from the univariate case to multiple dimensions and show how inference can be based on these results. Furthermore, we show that lag augmentation and a recent instrumental variable procedure can also yield uniformly valid tests and confidence regions. We verify the theoretical findings and investigate finite sample properties in simulation experiments for two specific examples.
We analyze the impact of speaker adaptation in end-to-end automatic speech recognition models based on transformers and wav2vec 2.0 under different noise conditions. By including speaker embeddings obtained from x-vector and ECAPA-TDNN systems, as well as i-vectors, we achieve relative word error rate improvements of up to 16.3% on LibriSpeech and up to 14.5% on Switchboard. We show that the proven method of concatenating speaker vectors to the acoustic features and supplying them as auxiliary model inputs remains a viable option to increase the robustness of end-to-end architectures. The effect on transformer models is stronger, when more noise is added to the input speech. The most substantial benefits for systems based on wav2vec 2.0 are achieved under moderate or no noise conditions. Both x-vectors and ECAPA-TDNN embeddings outperform i-vectors as speaker representations. The optimal embedding size depends on the dataset and also varies with the noise condition.
Expressive state-of-the-art separation logics rely on step-indexing to model semantically complex features and to support modular reasoning about imperative higher-order concurrent and distributed programs. Step-indexing comes, however, with an inherent cost: it restricts the adequacy theorem of program logics to a fairly simple class of safety properties. In this paper, we explore if and how intensional refinement is a viable methodology for strengthening higher-order concurrent (and distributed) separation logic to prove non-trivial safety and liveness properties. Specifically, we introduce Trillium, a language-agnostic separation logic framework for showing intensional refinement relations between traces of a program and a model. We instantiate Trillium with a concurrent language and develop Fairis, a concurrent separation logic, that we use to show liveness properties of concurrent programs under fair scheduling assumptions through a fair liveness-preserving refinement of a model. We also instantiate Trillium with a distributed language and obtain an extension of Aneris, a distributed separation logic, which we use to show refinement relations between distributed systems and TLA+ models.
In-context learning (ICL) using large language models for tasks with many labels is challenging due to the limited context window, which makes it difficult to fit a sufficient number of examples in the prompt. In this paper, we use a pre-trained dense retrieval model to bypass this limitation, giving the model only a partial view of the full label space for each inference call. Testing with recent open-source LLMs (OPT, LLaMA), we set new state of the art performance in few-shot settings for three common intent classification datasets, with no finetuning. We also surpass fine-tuned performance on fine-grained sentiment classification in certain cases. We analyze the performance across number of in-context examples and different model scales, showing that larger models are necessary to effectively and consistently make use of larger context lengths for ICL. By running several ablations, we analyze the model's use of: a) the similarity of the in-context examples to the current input, b) the semantic content of the class names, and c) the correct correspondence between examples and labels. We demonstrate that all three are needed to varying degrees depending on the domain, contrary to certain recent works.
We present parallel proof-of-work with DAG-style voting, a novel proof-of-work cryptocurrency protocol that, compared to Bitcoin, provides better consistency guarantees, higher transaction throughput, lower transaction confirmation latency, and higher resilience against incentive attacks. The superior consistency guarantees follow from implementing parallel proof-of-work, a recent consensus scheme that enforces a configurable number of proof-of-work votes per block. Our work is inspired by another recent protocol, Tailstorm, which structures the individual votes as tree and mitigates incentive attacks by discounting the mining rewards proportionally to the depth of the tree. We propose to structure the votes as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) instead of a tree. This allows for a more targeted punishment of offending miners and, as we show through a reinforcement learning based attack search, makes the protocol even more resilient to incentive attacks. An interesting by-product of our analysis is that parallel proof-of-work without reward discounting is less resilient to incentive attacks than Bitcoin in some realistic network scenarios.
We systematically study how three large language models with code capabilities - CodeT5, Codex, and ChatGPT - generalize to out-of-domain data. We consider two fundamental applications - code summarization, and code generation. We split data into domains following its natural boundaries - by an organization, by a project, and by a module within the software project. We establish that samples from each new domain present all the models with a significant challenge of distribution shift. We study how established methods adapt models to better generalize to new domains. Our experiments show that while multitask learning alone is a reasonable baseline, combining it with few-shot finetuning on examples retrieved from training data can achieve very strong performance. Moreover, this solution can outperform direct finetuning for very low-data scenarios. Finally, we consider variations of this approach to create a more broadly applicable method to adapt to multiple domains at once. We find that for code generation, a model adapted to multiple domains simultaneously performs on par with those adapted to a single domain
Intent classification and slot filling are two essential tasks for natural language understanding. They often suffer from small-scale human-labeled training data, resulting in poor generalization capability, especially for rare words. Recently a new language representation model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), facilitates pre-training deep bidirectional representations on large-scale unlabeled corpora, and has created state-of-the-art models for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks after simple fine-tuning. However, there has not been much effort on exploring BERT for natural language understanding. In this work, we propose a joint intent classification and slot filling model based on BERT. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on several public benchmark datasets, compared to the attention-based recurrent neural network models and slot-gated models.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.