The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at //github.com/huggingface/datablations.
Grid visualizations are widely used in many applications to visually explain a set of data and their proximity relationships. However, existing layout methods face difficulties when dealing with the inherent cluster structures within the data. To address this issue, we propose a cluster-aware grid layout method that aims to better preserve cluster structures by simultaneously considering proximity, compactness, and convexity in the optimization process. Our method utilizes a hybrid optimization strategy that consists of two phases. The global phase aims to balance proximity and compactness within each cluster, while the local phase ensures the convexity of cluster shapes. We evaluate the proposed grid layout method through a series of quantitative experiments and two use cases, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving cluster structures and facilitating analysis tasks.
The Attention module finds common usage in language modeling, presenting distinct challenges within the broader scope of Natural Language Processing. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) employs an absolute positional encoding, which imposes limitations on token length and entails substantial memory consumption during the processing of embedded inputs. The current remedy proposed by researchers involves the utilization of relative positional encoding, similar to the approach adopted in Transformer-XL or Relative Multi-Head Attention (RMHA), albeit the employed architecture consumes considerable memory resources. To address these challenges, this study endeavors to refine MHA, leveraging relative positional encoding in conjunction with the Depth-Wise Convolutional Layer architecture, which promises heightened accuracy coupled with minimized memory usage. The proposed RCMHA framework entails the modification of two integral components: firstly, the application of the Depth-Wise Convolutional Layer to the input embedding, encompassing Query, Key, and Value parameters; secondly, the incorporation of Relative Positional Encoding into the attention scoring phase, harmoniously integrated with Scaled Dot-Product Attention. Empirical experiments underscore the advantages of RCMHA, wherein it exhibits superior accuracy, boasting a score of 0.572 in comparison to alternative attention modules such as MHA, Multi-DConv-Head Attention (MDHA), and RMHA. Concerning memory utilization, RMHA emerges as the most frugal, demonstrating an average consumption of 2.98 GB, surpassing RMHA which necessitates 3.5 GB.
Federated learning has gained popularity as a means of training models distributed across the wireless edge. The paper introduces delay-aware hierarchical federated learning (DFL) to improve the efficiency of distributed machine learning (ML) model training by accounting for communication delays between edge and cloud. Different from traditional federated learning, DFL leverages multiple stochastic gradient descent iterations on device datasets within each global aggregation period and intermittently aggregates model parameters through edge servers in local subnetworks. During global synchronization, the cloud server consolidates local models with the outdated global model using a local-global combiner, thus preserving crucial elements of both, enhancing learning efficiency under the presence of delay. A set of conditions is obtained to achieve the sub-linear convergence rate of O(1/k). Based on these findings, an adaptive control algorithm is developed for DFL, implementing policies to mitigate energy consumption and communication latency while aiming for a sublinear convergence rate. Numerical evaluations show DFL's superior performance in terms of faster global model convergence, reduced resource consumption, and robustness against communication delays compared to existing FL algorithms. In summary, this proposed method offers improved efficiency and results when dealing with both convex and non-convex loss functions.
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In this work, we argue that existing pretext tasks inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, which in turn leads to biased transfer performance on various downstream tasks. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding (MEC), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen downstream tasks. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy in information theory, we hypothesize that a generalizable representation should be the one that admits the maximum entropy among all plausible representations. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective that allows fast computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEC learns a more generalizable representation than previous methods based on specific pretext tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on various downstream tasks, including not only ImageNet linear probe, but also semi-supervised classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking. Interestingly, we show that existing batch-wise and feature-wise self-supervised objectives could be seen equivalent to low-order approximations of MEC. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/xinliu20/MEC.
We propose GAN-Supervised Learning, a framework for learning discriminative models and their GAN-generated training data jointly end-to-end. We apply our framework to the dense visual alignment problem. Inspired by the classic Congealing method, our GANgealing algorithm trains a Spatial Transformer to map random samples from a GAN trained on unaligned data to a common, jointly-learned target mode. We show results on eight datasets, all of which demonstrate our method successfully aligns complex data and discovers dense correspondences. GANgealing significantly outperforms past self-supervised correspondence algorithms and performs on-par with (and sometimes exceeds) state-of-the-art supervised correspondence algorithms on several datasets -- without making use of any correspondence supervision or data augmentation and despite being trained exclusively on GAN-generated data. For precise correspondence, we improve upon state-of-the-art supervised methods by as much as $3\times$. We show applications of our method for augmented reality, image editing and automated pre-processing of image datasets for downstream GAN training.
Knowledge graph (KG) embeddings learn low-dimensional representations of entities and relations to predict missing facts. KGs often exhibit hierarchical and logical patterns which must be preserved in the embedding space. For hierarchical data, hyperbolic embedding methods have shown promise for high-fidelity and parsimonious representations. However, existing hyperbolic embedding methods do not account for the rich logical patterns in KGs. In this work, we introduce a class of hyperbolic KG embedding models that simultaneously capture hierarchical and logical patterns. Our approach combines hyperbolic reflections and rotations with attention to model complex relational patterns. Experimental results on standard KG benchmarks show that our method improves over previous Euclidean- and hyperbolic-based efforts by up to 6.1% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR) in low dimensions. Furthermore, we observe that different geometric transformations capture different types of relations while attention-based transformations generalize to multiple relations. In high dimensions, our approach yields new state-of-the-art MRRs of 49.6% on WN18RR and 57.7% on YAGO3-10.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as useful resources for various natural language processing applications. Previous KG completion approaches require a large number of training instances (i.e., head-tail entity pairs) for every relation. The real case is that for most of the relations, very few entity pairs are available. Existing work of one-shot learning limits method generalizability for few-shot scenarios and does not fully use the supervisory information; however, few-shot KG completion has not been well studied yet. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot relation learning model (FSRL) that aims at discovering facts of new relations with few-shot references. FSRL can effectively capture knowledge from heterogeneous graph structure, aggregate representations of few-shot references, and match similar entity pairs of reference set for every relation. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that FSRL outperforms the state-of-the-art.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
Deep learning applies multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of feature extraction. This emerging technique has reshaped the research landscape of face recognition since 2014, launched by the breakthroughs of Deepface and DeepID methods. Since then, deep face recognition (FR) technique, which leverages the hierarchical architecture to learn discriminative face representation, has dramatically improved the state-of-the-art performance and fostered numerous successful real-world applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the recent developments on deep FR, covering the broad topics on algorithms, data, and scenes. First, we summarize different network architectures and loss functions proposed in the rapid evolution of the deep FR methods. Second, the related face processing methods are categorized into two classes: `one-to-many augmentation' and `many-to-one normalization'. Then, we summarize and compare the commonly used databases for both model training and evaluation. Third, we review miscellaneous scenes in deep FR, such as cross-factor, heterogenous, multiple-media and industry scenes. Finally, potential deficiencies of the current methods and several future directions are highlighted.