Language use differs dramatically from context to context. To some degree, modern language models like GPT-3 are able to account for such variance by conditioning on a string of previous input text, or prompt. Yet prompting is ineffective when contexts are sparse, out-of-sample, or extra-textual; for instance, accounting for when and where the text was produced or who produced it. In this paper, we introduce the mixed-effects transformer (MET), a novel approach for learning hierarchically-structured prefixes -- lightweight modules prepended to the input -- to account for structured variation. Specifically, we show how the popular class of mixed-effects models may be extended to transformer-based architectures using a regularized prefix-tuning procedure with dropout. We evaluate this approach on several domain-adaptation benchmarks, finding that it efficiently adapts to novel contexts with minimal data while still effectively generalizing to unseen contexts.
Recent advances in Transformer architectures have empowered their empirical success in a variety of tasks across different domains. However, existing works mainly focus on predictive accuracy and computational cost, without considering other practical issues, such as robustness to contaminated samples. Recent work by Nguyen et al., (2022) has shown that the self-attention mechanism, which is the center of the Transformer architecture, can be viewed as a non-parametric estimator based on kernel density estimation (KDE). This motivates us to leverage a set of robust kernel density estimation methods for alleviating the issue of data contamination. Specifically, we introduce a series of self-attention mechanisms that can be incorporated into different Transformer architectures and discuss the special properties of each method. We then perform extensive empirical studies on language modeling and image classification tasks. Our methods demonstrate robust performance in multiple scenarios while maintaining competitive results on clean datasets.
Simulation parameter settings such as contact models and object geometry approximations are critical to training robust robotic policies capable of transferring from simulation to real-world deployment. Previous approaches typically handcraft distributions over such parameters (domain randomization), or identify parameters that best match the dynamics of the real environment (system identification). However, there is often an irreducible gap between simulation and reality: attempting to match the dynamics between simulation and reality across all states and tasks may be infeasible and may not lead to policies that perform well in reality for a specific task. Addressing this issue, we propose AdaptSim, a new task-driven adaptation framework for sim-to-real transfer that aims to optimize task performance in target (real) environments -- instead of matching dynamics between simulation and reality. First, we meta-learn an adaptation policy in simulation using reinforcement learning for adjusting the simulation parameter distribution based on the current policy's performance in a target environment. We then perform iterative real-world adaptation by inferring new simulation parameter distributions for policy training, using a small amount of real data. We perform experiments in three robotic tasks: (1) swing-up of linearized double pendulum, (2) dynamic table-top pushing of a bottle, and (3) dynamic scooping of food pieces with a spatula. Our extensive simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate AdaptSim achieving 1-3x asymptotic performance and $\sim$2x real data efficiency when adapting to different environments, compared to methods based on Sys-ID and directly training the task policy in target environments.
While a large number of pre-trained models of source code have been successfully developed and applied to a variety of software engineering (SE) tasks in recent years, our understanding of these pre-trained models is arguably fairly limited. With the goal of advancing our understanding of these models, we perform the first systematic empirical comparison of 19 recently-developed pre-trained models of source code on 13 SE tasks. To gain additional insights into these models, we adopt a recently-developed 4-dimensional categorization of pre-trained models, and subsequently investigate whether there are correlations between different categories of pre-trained models and their performances on different SE tasks.
Many sectors nowadays require accurate and coherent predictions across their organization to effectively operate. Otherwise, decision-makers would be planning using disparate views of the future, resulting in inconsistent decisions across their sectors. To secure coherency across hierarchies, recent research has put forward hierarchical learning, a coherency-informed hierarchical regressor leveraging the power of machine learning thanks to a custom loss function founded on optimal reconciliation methods. While promising potentials were outlined, results exhibited discordant performances in which coherency information only improved hierarchical forecasts in one setting. This work proposes to tackle these obstacles by investigating custom neural network designs inspired by the topological structures of hierarchies. Results unveil that, in a data-limited setting, structural models with fewer connections perform overall best and demonstrate the coherency information value for both accuracy and coherency forecasting performances, provided individual forecasts were generated within reasonable accuracy limits. Overall, this work expands and improves hierarchical learning methods thanks to a structurally-scaled learning mechanism extension coupled with tailored network designs, producing a resourceful, data-efficient, and information-rich learning process.
The emergency of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) has achieved tremendous success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by learning universal representations on large corpora in a self-supervised manner. The pre-trained models and the learned representations can be beneficial to a series of downstream NLP tasks. This training paradigm has recently been adapted to the recommendation domain and is considered a promising approach by both academia and industry. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to extract and transfer knowledge from pre-trained models learned by different PLM-related training paradigms to improve recommendation performance from various perspectives, such as generality, sparsity, efficiency and effectiveness. Specifically, we propose an orthogonal taxonomy to divide existing PLM-based recommender systems w.r.t. their training strategies and objectives. Then, we analyze and summarize the connection between PLM-based training paradigms and different input data types for recommender systems. Finally, we elaborate on open issues and future research directions in this vibrant field.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
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.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
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.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.