Large pre-trained language models have been used to generate code,providing a flexible interface for synthesizing programs from natural language specifications. However, they often violate syntactic and semantic rules of their output language, limiting their practical usability. In this paper, we propose Synchromesh: a framework for substantially improving the reliability of pre-trained models for code generation. Synchromesh comprises two components. First, it retrieves few-shot examples from a training bank using Target Similarity Tuning (TST), a novel method for semantic example selection. TST learns to recognize utterances that describe similar target programs despite differences in surface natural language features. Then, Synchromesh feeds the examples to a pre-trained language model and samples programs using Constrained Semantic Decoding (CSD): a general framework for constraining the output to a set of valid programs in the target language. CSD leverages constraints on partial outputs to sample complete correct programs, and needs neither re-training nor fine-tuning of the language model. We evaluate our methods by synthesizing code from natural language descriptions using GPT-3 and Codex in three real-world languages: SQL queries, Vega-Lite visualizations and SMCalFlow programs. These domains showcase rich constraints that CSD is able to enforce, including syntax, scope, typing rules, and contextual logic. We observe substantial complementary gains from CSD and TST in prediction accuracy and in effectively preventing run-time errors.
Recent work (e.g. LAMA (Petroni et al., 2019)) has found that the quality of the factual information extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the prompts used to query them. This inconsistency is problematic because different users will query LLMs for the same information using different wording, but should receive the same, accurate responses regardless. In this work we aim to address this shortcoming by introducing P-Adapters: lightweight models that sit between the embedding layer and first attention layer of LLMs. They take LLM embeddings as input and output continuous prompts that are used to query the LLM. Additionally, we investigate Mixture of Experts (MoE) models that learn a set of continuous prompts ("experts") and select one to query the LLM. They require a separate classifier trained on human-annotated data to map natural language prompts to the continuous ones. P-Adapters perform comparably to the more complex MoE models in extracting factual information from BERT and RoBERTa while eliminating the need for additional annotations. P-Adapters show between 12-26% absolute improvement in precision and 36-50% absolute improvement in consistency over a baseline of only using natural language queries. Finally, we investigate what makes P-Adapters successful and conclude that a significant factor is access to the LLM's embeddings of the original natural language prompt, particularly the subject of the entity pair being queried.
Approximately 50% of development resources are devoted to UI development tasks [9]. Occupying a large proportion of development resources, developing icons can be a time-consuming task, because developers need to consider not only effective implementation methods but also easy-to-understand descriptions. In this paper, we present Auto-Icon+, an approach for automatically generating readable and efficient code for icons from design artifacts. According to our interviews to understand the gap between designers (icons are assembled from multiple components) and developers (icons as single images), we apply a heuristic clustering algorithm to compose the components into an icon image. We then propose an approach based on a deep learning model and computer vision methods to convert the composed icon image to fonts with descriptive labels, thereby reducing the laborious manual effort for developers and facilitating UI development. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of our method in the real world UI development environment and demonstrate that our method offers developers accurate, efficient, readable, and usable code for icon designs, in terms of saving 65.2% implementing time.
Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged to any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in //github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.
We study multimodal few-shot object detection (FSOD) in this paper, using both few-shot visual examples and class semantic information for detection. Most of previous works focus on either few-shot or zero-shot object detection, ignoring the complementarity of visual and semantic information. We first show that meta-learning and prompt-based learning, the most commonly-used methods for few-shot learning and zero-shot transferring from pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks, are conceptually similar. They both reformulate the objective of downstream tasks the same as the pre-training tasks, and mostly without tuning the parameters of pre-trained models. Based on this observation, we propose to combine meta-learning with prompt-based learning for multimodal FSOD without fine-tuning, by learning transferable class-agnostic multimodal FSOD models over many-shot base classes. Specifically, to better exploit the pre-trained vision-language models, the meta-learning based cross-modal prompting is proposed to generate soft prompts and further used to extract the semantic prototype, conditioned on the few-shot visual examples. Then, the extracted semantic prototype and few-shot visual prototype are fused to generate the multimodal prototype for detection. Our models can efficiently fuse the visual and semantic information at both token-level and feature-level. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed multimodal FSOD models on multiple few-shot object detection benchmarks, achieving promising results.
Pre-trained models are widely used in the tasks of natural language processing nowadays. However, in the specific field of text simplification, the research on improving pre-trained models is still blank. In this work, we propose a continued pre-training method for text simplification. Specifically, we propose a new masked language modeling (MLM) mechanism, which does not randomly mask words but only masks simple words. The new mechanism can make the model learn to generate simple words. We use a small-scale simple text dataset for continued pre-training and employ two methods to identify simple words from the texts. We choose BERT, a representative pre-trained model, and continue pre-training it using our proposed method. Finally, we obtain SimpleBERT, which surpasses BERT in both lexical simplification and sentence simplification tasks and has achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets. What's more, SimpleBERT can replace BERT in existing simplification models without modification.
Due to the success of pre-trained language models, versions of languages other than English have been released in recent years. This fact implies the need for resources to evaluate these models. In the case of Spanish, there are few ways to systematically assess the models' quality. In this paper, we narrow the gap by building two evaluation benchmarks. Inspired by previous work (Conneau and Kiela, 2018; Chen et al., 2019), we introduce Spanish SentEval and Spanish DiscoEval, aiming to assess the capabilities of stand-alone and discourse-aware sentence representations, respectively. Our benchmarks include considerable pre-existing and newly constructed datasets that address different tasks from various domains. In addition, we evaluate and analyze the most recent pre-trained Spanish language models to exhibit their capabilities and limitations. As an example, we discover that for the case of discourse evaluation tasks, mBERT, a language model trained on multiple languages, usually provides a richer latent representation than models trained only with documents in Spanish. We hope our contribution will motivate a fairer, more comparable, and less cumbersome way to evaluate future Spanish language models.
Existing Chinese text error detection mainly focuses on spelling and simple grammatical errors. These errors have been studied extensively and are relatively simple for humans. On the contrary, Chinese semantic errors are understudied and more complex that humans cannot easily recognize. The task of this paper is Chinese Semantic Error Recognition (CSER), a binary classification task to determine whether a sentence contains semantic errors. The current research has no effective method to solve this task. In this paper, we inherit the model structure of BERT and design several syntax-related pre-training tasks so that the model can learn syntactic knowledge. Our pre-training tasks consider both the directionality of the dependency structure and the diversity of the dependency relationship. Due to the lack of a published dataset for CSER, we build a high-quality dataset for CSER for the first time named Corpus of Chinese Linguistic Semantic Acceptability (CoCLSA). The experimental results on the CoCLSA show that our methods outperform universal pre-trained models and syntax-infused models.
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.
Recent work pre-training Transformers with self-supervised objectives on large text corpora has shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream NLP tasks including text summarization. However, pre-training objectives tailored for abstractive text summarization have not been explored. Furthermore there is a lack of systematic evaluation across diverse domains. In this work, we propose pre-training large Transformer-based encoder-decoder models on massive text corpora with a new self-supervised objective. In PEGASUS, important sentences are removed/masked from an input document and are generated together as one output sequence from the remaining sentences, similar to an extractive summary. We evaluated our best PEGASUS model on 12 downstream summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills. Experiments demonstrate it achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 12 downstream datasets measured by ROUGE scores. Our model also shows surprising performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results on 6 datasets with only 1000 examples. Finally we validated our results using human evaluation and show that our model summaries achieve human performance on multiple datasets.
In this paper, we propose Latent Relation Language Models (LRLMs), a class of language models that parameterizes the joint distribution over the words in a document and the entities that occur therein via knowledge graph relations. This model has a number of attractive properties: it not only improves language modeling performance, but is also able to annotate the posterior probability of entity spans for a given text through relations. Experiments demonstrate empirical improvements over both a word-based baseline language model and a previous approach that incorporates knowledge graph information. Qualitative analysis further demonstrates the proposed model's ability to learn to predict appropriate relations in context.