In this paper, we introduce and analyze a variant of the Thompson sampling (TS) algorithm for contextual bandits. At each round, traditional TS requires samples from the current posterior distribution, which is usually intractable. To circumvent this issue, approximate inference techniques can be used and provide samples with distribution close to the posteriors. However, current approximate techniques yield to either poor estimation (Laplace approximation) or can be computationally expensive (MCMC methods, Ensemble sampling...). In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Varational Inference Thompson sampling VITS, based on Gaussian Variational Inference. This scheme provides powerful posterior approximations which are easy to sample from, and is computationally efficient, making it an ideal choice for TS. In addition, we show that VITS achieves a sub-linear regret bound of the same order in the dimension and number of round as traditional TS for linear contextual bandit. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally the effectiveness of VITS on both synthetic and real world datasets.
In this paper, we introduce a two-level attention schema, Poolingformer, for long document modeling. Its first level uses a smaller sliding window pattern to aggregate information from neighbors. Its second level employs a larger window to increase receptive fields with pooling attention to reduce both computational cost and memory consumption. We first evaluate Poolingformer on two long sequence QA tasks: the monolingual NQ and the multilingual TyDi QA. Experimental results show that Poolingformer sits atop three official leaderboards measured by F1, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 1.9 points (79.8 vs. 77.9) on NQ long answer, 1.9 points (79.5 vs. 77.6) on TyDi QA passage answer, and 1.6 points (67.6 vs. 66.0) on TyDi QA minimal answer. We further evaluate Poolingformer on a long sequence summarization task. Experimental results on the arXiv benchmark continue to demonstrate its superior performance.
This paper explores meta-learning in sequential recommendation to alleviate the item cold-start problem. Sequential recommendation aims to capture user's dynamic preferences based on historical behavior sequences and acts as a key component of most online recommendation scenarios. However, most previous methods have trouble recommending cold-start items, which are prevalent in those scenarios. As there is generally no side information in the setting of sequential recommendation task, previous cold-start methods could not be applied when only user-item interactions are available. Thus, we propose a Meta-learning-based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation Framework, namely Mecos, to mitigate the item cold-start problem in sequential recommendation. This task is non-trivial as it targets at an important problem in a novel and challenging context. Mecos effectively extracts user preference from limited interactions and learns to match the target cold-start item with the potential user. Besides, our framework can be painlessly integrated with neural network-based models. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets verify the superiority of Mecos, with the average improvement up to 99%, 91%, and 70% in HR@10 over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.
With the rise of knowledge graph (KG), question answering over knowledge base (KBQA) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Despite much research has been conducted on this topic, it is still challenging to apply KBQA technology in industry because business knowledge and real-world questions can be rather complicated. In this paper, we present AliMe-KBQA, a bold attempt to apply KBQA in the E-commerce customer service field. To handle real knowledge and questions, we extend the classic "subject-predicate-object (SPO)" structure with property hierarchy, key-value structure and compound value type (CVT), and enhance traditional KBQA with constraints recognition and reasoning ability. We launch AliMe-KBQA in the Marketing Promotion scenario for merchants during the "Double 11" period in 2018 and other such promotional events afterwards. Online results suggest that AliMe-KBQA is not only able to gain better resolution and improve customer satisfaction, but also becomes the preferred knowledge management method by business knowledge staffs since it offers a more convenient and efficient management experience.
A sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit of human languages. Sememe knowledge bases (KBs), which contain words annotated with sememes, have been successfully applied to many NLP tasks. However, existing sememe KBs are built on only a few languages, which hinders their widespread utilization. To address the issue, we propose to build a unified sememe KB for multiple languages based on BabelNet, a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. We first build a dataset serving as the seed of the multilingual sememe KB. It manually annotates sememes for over $15$ thousand synsets (the entries of BabelNet). Then, we present a novel task of automatic sememe prediction for synsets, aiming to expand the seed dataset into a usable KB. We also propose two simple and effective models, which exploit different information of synsets. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore important factors and difficulties in the task. All the source code and data of this work can be obtained on //github.com/thunlp/BabelNet-Sememe-Prediction.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
BERT, a pre-trained Transformer model, has achieved ground-breaking performance on multiple NLP tasks. In this paper, we describe BERTSUM, a simple variant of BERT, for extractive summarization. Our system is the state of the art on the CNN/Dailymail dataset, outperforming the previous best-performed system by 1.65 on ROUGE-L. The codes to reproduce our results are available at //github.com/nlpyang/BertSum
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.
This paper reports Deep LOGISMOS approach to 3D tumor segmentation by incorporating boundary information derived from deep contextual learning to LOGISMOS - layered optimal graph image segmentation of multiple objects and surfaces. Accurate and reliable tumor segmentation is essential to tumor growth analysis and treatment selection. A fully convolutional network (FCN), UNet, is first trained using three adjacent 2D patches centered at the tumor, providing contextual UNet segmentation and probability map for each 2D patch. The UNet segmentation is then refined by Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and morphological operations. The refined UNet segmentation is used to provide the initial shape boundary to build a segmentation graph. The cost for each node of the graph is determined by the UNet probability maps. Finally, a max-flow algorithm is employed to find the globally optimal solution thus obtaining the final segmentation. For evaluation, we applied the method to pancreatic tumor segmentation on a dataset of 51 CT scans, among which 30 scans were used for training and 21 for testing. With Deep LOGISMOS, DICE Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Relative Volume Difference (RVD) reached 83.2+-7.8% and 18.6+-17.4% respectively, both are significantly improved (p<0.05) compared with contextual UNet and/or LOGISMOS alone.
We study the problem of learning to reason in large scale knowledge graphs (KGs). More specifically, we describe a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning multi-hop relational paths: we use a policy-based agent with continuous states based on knowledge graph embeddings, which reasons in a KG vector space by sampling the most promising relation to extend its path. In contrast to prior work, our approach includes a reward function that takes the accuracy, diversity, and efficiency into consideration. Experimentally, we show that our proposed method outperforms a path-ranking based algorithm and knowledge graph embedding methods on Freebase and Never-Ending Language Learning datasets.