Distillation efforts have led to language models that are more compact and efficient without serious drops in performance. The standard approach to distillation trains a student model against two objectives: a task-specific objective (e.g., language modeling) and an imitation objective that encourages the hidden states of the student model to be similar to those of the larger teacher model. In this paper, we show that it is beneficial to augment distillation with a third objective that encourages the student to imitate the causal computation process of the teacher through interchange intervention training(IIT). IIT pushes the student model to become a causal abstraction of the teacher model - a simpler model with the same causal structure. IIT is fully differentiable, easily implemented, and combines flexibly with other objectives. Compared with standard distillation of BERT, distillation via IIT results in lower perplexity on Wikipedia (masked language modeling) and marked improvements on the GLUE benchmark (natural language understanding), SQuAD (question answering), and CoNLL-2003 (named entity recognition).
Recent breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been driven by language models trained on a massive amount of plain text. While powerful, deriving supervision from textual resources is still an open question. For example, language model pretraining often neglects the rich, freely-available structures in textual data. In this thesis, we describe three lines of work that seek to improve the training and evaluation of neural models using naturally-occurring supervision. We first investigate self-supervised training losses to help enhance the performance of pretrained language models for various NLP tasks. Specifically, we alter the sentence prediction loss to make it better suited to other pretraining losses and more challenging to solve. We design an intermediate finetuning step that uses self-supervised training to promote models' ability in cross-task generalization. Then we describe methods to leverage the structures in Wikipedia and paraphrases. In particular, we propose training losses to exploit hyperlinks, article structures, and article category graphs for entity-, discourse-, entailment-related knowledge. We propose a framework that uses paraphrase pairs to disentangle semantics and syntax in sentence representations. We extend the framework for a novel generation task that controls the syntax of output text with a sentential exemplar. Lastly, we discuss our work on tailoring textual resources for establishing challenging evaluation tasks. We introduce three datasets by defining novel tasks using various fan-contributed websites, including a long-form data-to-text generation dataset, a screenplay summarization dataset, and a long-form story generation dataset. These datasets have unique characteristics offering challenges to future work in their respective task settings.
Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are probabilistic models, and may be expressed in the language of graphical models with random variables whose values are complex data types such as strings. Cases with control flow and dynamic structure require techniques from probabilistic programming, which allow implementing disparate model structures and inference strategies in a unified language. We formalize several existing techniques from this perspective, including scratchpads / chain of thought, verifiers, STaR, selection-inference, and tool use. We refer to the resulting programs as language model cascades.
Modern language models leverage increasingly large numbers of parameters to achieve performance on natural language understanding tasks. Ensembling these models in specific configurations for downstream tasks show even further performance improvements. In this paper, we perform an analysis of bagging language models and compare single language models to bagged ensembles that are roughly equivalent in terms of final model size. We explore an array of model bagging configurations for natural language understanding tasks with final ensemble sizes ranging from 300M parameters to 1.5B parameters and determine that our ensembling methods are at best roughly equivalent to single LM baselines. We note other positive effects of bagging and pruning in specific scenarios according to findings in our experiments such as variance reduction and minor performance improvements.
While machine learning models rapidly advance the state-of-the-art on various real-world tasks, out-of-domain (OOD) generalization remains a challenging problem given the vulnerability of these models to spurious correlations. We propose a causally-motivated balanced mini-batch sampling strategy to transform the observed train distribution to a balanced distribution that is free of spurious correlations. We argue that the Bayes optimal classifier trained on such balanced distribution is minimax optimal across a diverse enough environment space. We also provide an identifiability guarantee of the latent variable model of the proposed underlying data generation process with invariant causal mechanisms, by utilizing enough number of train environments. Experiments are conducted on three domain generalization datasets, demonstrating empirically that our balanced mini-batch sampling strategy improves the performance of four different established domain generalization model baselines compared to the random mini-batch sampling strategy.
In this work we show how large language models (LLMs) can learn statistical dependencies between otherwise unconditionally independent variables due to dataset selection bias. To demonstrate the effect, we developed a masked gender task that can be applied to BERT-family models to reveal spurious correlations between predicted gender pronouns and a variety of seemingly gender-neutral variables like date and location, on pre-trained (unmodified) BERT and RoBERTa large models. Finally, we provide an online demo, inviting readers to experiment further.
We present prompt distribution learning for effectively adapting a pre-trained vision-language model to address downstream recognition tasks. Our method not only learns low-bias prompts from a few samples but also captures the distribution of diverse prompts to handle the varying visual representations. In this way, we provide high-quality task-related content for facilitating recognition. This prompt distribution learning is realized by an efficient approach that learns the output embeddings of prompts instead of the input embeddings. Thus, we can employ a Gaussian distribution to model them effectively and derive a surrogate loss for efficient training. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, with 1 sample per category, it relatively improves the average result by 9.1% compared to human-crafted prompts.
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely-used technology to inherit information from cumbersome teacher models to compact student models, consequently realizing model compression and acceleration. Compared with image classification, object detection is a more complex task, and designing specific KD methods for object detection is non-trivial. In this work, we elaborately study the behaviour difference between the teacher and student detection models, and obtain two intriguing observations: First, the teacher and student rank their detected candidate boxes quite differently, which results in their precision discrepancy. Second, there is a considerable gap between the feature response differences and prediction differences between teacher and student, indicating that equally imitating all the feature maps of the teacher is the sub-optimal choice for improving the student's accuracy. Based on the two observations, we propose Rank Mimicking (RM) and Prediction-guided Feature Imitation (PFI) for distilling one-stage detectors, respectively. RM takes the rank of candidate boxes from teachers as a new form of knowledge to distill, which consistently outperforms the traditional soft label distillation. PFI attempts to correlate feature differences with prediction differences, making feature imitation directly help to improve the student's accuracy. On MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks, extensive experiments are conducted on various detectors with different backbones to validate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet50 achieves 40.4% mAP in MS COCO, which is 3.5% higher than its baseline, and also outperforms previous KD methods.
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.
The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.
The goal of text ranking is to generate an ordered list of texts retrieved from a corpus in response to a query. Although the most common formulation of text ranking is search, instances of the task can also be found in many natural language processing applications. This survey provides an overview of text ranking with neural network architectures known as transformers, of which BERT is the best-known example. The combination of transformers and self-supervised pretraining has, without exaggeration, revolutionized the fields of natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and beyond. In this survey, we provide a synthesis of existing work as a single point of entry for practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of how to apply transformers to text ranking problems and researchers who wish to pursue work in this area. We cover a wide range of modern techniques, grouped into two high-level categories: transformer models that perform reranking in multi-stage ranking architectures and learned dense representations that attempt to perform ranking directly. There are two themes that pervade our survey: techniques for handling long documents, beyond the typical sentence-by-sentence processing approaches used in NLP, and techniques for addressing the tradeoff between effectiveness (result quality) and efficiency (query latency). Although transformer architectures and pretraining techniques are recent innovations, many aspects of how they are applied to text ranking are relatively well understood and represent mature techniques. However, there remain many open research questions, and thus in addition to laying out the foundations of pretrained transformers for text ranking, this survey also attempts to prognosticate where the field is heading.