Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable success in producing high-quality translations. However, current NMT systems suffer from a lack of reliability, as their outputs that are often affected by lexical or syntactic changes in inputs, resulting in large variations in quality. This limitation hinders the practicality and trustworthiness of NMT. A contributing factor to this problem is that NMT models trained with the one-to-one paradigm struggle to handle the source diversity phenomenon, where inputs with the same meaning can be expressed differently. In this work, we treat this problem as a bilevel optimization problem and present a consistency-aware meta-learning (CAML) framework derived from the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm to address it. Specifically, the NMT model with CAML (named CoNMT) first learns a consistent meta representation of semantically equivalent sentences in the outer loop. Subsequently, a mapping from the meta representation to the output sentence is learned in the inner loop, allowing the NMT model to translate semantically equivalent sentences to the same target sentence. We conduct experiments on the NIST Chinese to English task, three WMT translation tasks, and the TED M2O task. The results demonstrate that CoNMT effectively improves overall translation quality and reliably handles diverse inputs.
The medical conversational question answering (CQA) system aims at providing a series of professional medical services to improve the efficiency of medical care. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks in various fields, such as mathematics, logic, and commonsense QA, they still need to improve with the increased complexity and specialization of the medical field. This is because medical CQA tasks require not only strong medical reasoning, but also the ability to think broadly and deeply. In this paper, to address these challenges in medical CQA tasks that need to be considered and understood in many aspects, we propose the Holistically Thought (HoT) method, which is designed to guide the LLMs to perform the diffused and focused thinking for generating high-quality medical responses. The proposed HoT method has been evaluated through automated and manual assessments in three different medical CQA datasets containing the English and Chinese languages. The extensive experimental results show that our method can produce more correctness, professional, and considerate answers than several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, manifesting its effectiveness. Our code in //github.com/WENGSYX/HoT.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as one of the effective methods to design the optimal neural network architecture automatically. Although neural architectures have achieved human-level performances in several tasks, few of them are obtained from the NAS method. The main reason is the huge search space of neural architectures, making NAS algorithms inefficient. This work presents a novel architecture search algorithm, called GPT-NAS, that optimizes neural architectures by Generative Pre-Trained (GPT) model. In GPT-NAS, we assume that a generative model pre-trained on a large-scale corpus could learn the fundamental law of building neural architectures. Therefore, GPT-NAS leverages the generative pre-trained (GPT) model to propose reasonable architecture components given the basic one. Such an approach can largely reduce the search space by introducing prior knowledge in the search process. Extensive experimental results show that our GPT-NAS method significantly outperforms seven manually designed neural architectures and thirteen architectures provided by competing NAS methods. In addition, our ablation study indicates that the proposed algorithm improves the performance of finely tuned neural architectures by up to about 12% compared to those without GPT, further demonstrating its effectiveness in searching neural architectures.
Consistency is a key requirement of high-quality translation. It is especially important to adhere to pre-approved terminology and adapt to corrected translations in domain-specific projects. Machine translation (MT) has achieved significant progress in the area of domain adaptation. However, real-time adaptation remains challenging. Large-scale language models (LLMs) have recently shown interesting capabilities of in-context learning, where they learn to replicate certain input-output text generation patterns, without further fine-tuning. By feeding an LLM at inference time with a prompt that consists of a list of translation pairs, it can then simulate the domain and style characteristics. This work aims to investigate how we can utilize in-context learning to improve real-time adaptive MT. Our extensive experiments show promising results at translation time. For example, LLMs can adapt to a set of in-domain sentence pairs and/or terminology while translating a new sentence. We observe that the translation quality with few-shot in-context learning can surpass that of strong encoder-decoder MT systems, especially for high-resource languages. Moreover, we investigate whether we can combine MT from strong encoder-decoder models with fuzzy matches, which can further improve translation quality, especially for less supported languages. We conduct our experiments across five diverse language pairs, namely English-to-Arabic (EN-AR), English-to-Chinese (EN-ZH), English-to-French (EN-FR), English-to-Kinyarwanda (EN-RW), and English-to-Spanish (EN-ES).
Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims to translate texts embedded in images from one source language to another target language. Existing methods, both two-stage cascade and one-stage end-to-end architectures, suffer from different issues. The cascade models can benefit from the large-scale optical character recognition (OCR) and MT datasets but the two-stage architecture is redundant. The end-to-end models are efficient but suffer from training data deficiency. To this end, in our paper, we propose an end-to-end TIMT model fully making use of the knowledge from existing OCR and MT datasets to pursue both an effective and efficient framework. More specifically, we build a novel modal adapter effectively bridging the OCR encoder and MT decoder. End-to-end TIMT loss and cross-modal contrastive loss are utilized jointly to align the feature distribution of the OCR and MT tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the existing two-stage cascade models and one-stage end-to-end models with a lighter and faster architecture. Furthermore, the ablation studies verify the generalization of our method, where the proposed modal adapter is effective to bridge various OCR and MT models.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in general scenarios, exhibiting a level of aptitude that approaches, in some aspects even surpasses, human-level intelligence. Among their numerous skills, the translation abilities of LLMs have received considerable attention. In contrast to traditional machine translation that focuses solely on source-target mapping, LLM-based translation can potentially mimic the human translation process that takes many preparatory steps to ensure high-quality translation. This work aims to explore this possibility by proposing the MAPS framework, which stands for Multi-Aspect Prompting and Selection. Specifically, we enable LLMs to first analyze the given source text and extract three aspects of translation-related knowledge: keywords, topics and relevant demonstrations to guide the translation process. To filter out the noisy and unhelpful knowledge, we employ a selection mechanism based on quality estimation. Experiments suggest that MAPS brings significant and consistent improvements over text-davinci-003 and Alpaca on eight translation directions from the latest WMT22 test sets. Our further analysis shows that the extracted knowledge is critical in resolving up to 59% of hallucination mistakes in translation. Code is available at //github.com/zwhe99/MAPS-mt.
The phenomena of in-context learning has typically been thought of as "learning from examples". In this work which focuses on Machine Translation, we present a perspective of in-context learning as the desired generation task maintaining coherency with its context, i.e., the prompt examples. We first investigate randomly sampled prompts across 4 domains, and find that translation performance improves when shown in-domain prompts. Next, we investigate coherency for the in-domain setting, which uses prompt examples from a moving window. We study this with respect to other factors that have previously been identified in the literature such as length, surface similarity and sentence embedding similarity. Our results across 3 models (GPTNeo2.7B, Bloom3B, XGLM2.9B), and three translation directions (\texttt{en}$\rightarrow$\{\texttt{pt, de, fr}\}) suggest that the long-term coherency of the prompts and the test sentence is a good indicator of downstream translation performance. In doing so, we demonstrate the efficacy of In-context Machine Translation for on-the-fly adaptation.
Since the 1950s, machine translation (MT) has become one of the important tasks of AI and development, and has experienced several different periods and stages of development, including rule-based methods, statistical methods, and recently proposed neural network-based learning methods. Accompanying these staged leaps is the evaluation research and development of MT, especially the important role of evaluation methods in statistical translation and neural translation research. The evaluation task of MT is not only to evaluate the quality of machine translation, but also to give timely feedback to machine translation researchers on the problems existing in machine translation itself, how to improve and how to optimise. In some practical application fields, such as in the absence of reference translations, the quality estimation of machine translation plays an important role as an indicator to reveal the credibility of automatically translated target languages. This report mainly includes the following contents: a brief history of machine translation evaluation (MTE), the classification of research methods on MTE, and the the cutting-edge progress, including human evaluation, automatic evaluation, and evaluation of evaluation methods (meta-evaluation). Manual evaluation and automatic evaluation include reference-translation based and reference-translation independent participation; automatic evaluation methods include traditional n-gram string matching, models applying syntax and semantics, and deep learning models; evaluation of evaluation methods includes estimating the credibility of human evaluations, the reliability of the automatic evaluation, the reliability of the test set, etc. Advances in cutting-edge evaluation methods include task-based evaluation, using pre-trained language models based on big data, and lightweight optimisation models using distillation techniques.
Behaviors of the synthetic characters in current military simulations are limited since they are generally generated by rule-based and reactive computational models with minimal intelligence. Such computational models cannot adapt to reflect the experience of the characters, resulting in brittle intelligence for even the most effective behavior models devised via costly and labor-intensive processes. Observation-based behavior model adaptation that leverages machine learning and the experience of synthetic entities in combination with appropriate prior knowledge can address the issues in the existing computational behavior models to create a better training experience in military training simulations. In this paper, we introduce a framework that aims to create autonomous synthetic characters that can perform coherent sequences of believable behavior while being aware of human trainees and their needs within a training simulation. This framework brings together three mutually complementary components. The first component is a Unity-based simulation environment - Rapid Integration and Development Environment (RIDE) - supporting One World Terrain (OWT) models and capable of running and supporting machine learning experiments. The second is Shiva, a novel multi-agent reinforcement and imitation learning framework that can interface with a variety of simulation environments, and that can additionally utilize a variety of learning algorithms. The final component is the Sigma Cognitive Architecture that will augment the behavior models with symbolic and probabilistic reasoning capabilities. We have successfully created proof-of-concept behavior models leveraging this framework on realistic terrain as an essential step towards bringing machine learning into military simulations.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.