Pretrained language models are generally acknowledged to be able to encode syntax [Tenney et al., 2019, Jawahar et al., 2019, Hewitt and Manning, 2019]. In this article, we propose UPOA, an Unsupervised constituent Parsing model that calculates an Out Association score solely based on the self-attention weight matrix learned in a pretrained language model as the syntactic distance for span segmentation. We further propose an enhanced version, UPIO, which exploits both inside association and outside association scores for estimating the likelihood of a span. Experiments with UPOA and UPIO disclose that the linear projection matrices for the query and key in the self-attention mechanism play an important role in parsing. We therefore extend the unsupervised models to few-shot parsing models (FPOA, FPIO) that use a few annotated trees to learn better linear projection matrices for parsing. Experiments on the Penn Treebank demonstrate that our unsupervised parsing model UPIO achieves results comparable to the state of the art on short sentences (length <= 10). Our few-shot parsing model FPIO trained with only 20 annotated trees outperforms a previous few-shot parsing method trained with 50 annotated trees. Experiments on cross-lingual parsing show that both unsupervised and few-shot parsing methods are better than previous methods on most languages of SPMRL [Seddah et al., 2013].
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) transfers knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a different but related fully-unlabeled target domain. To address the problem of domain shift, more and more UDA methods adopt pseudo labels of the target samples to improve the generalization ability on the target domain. However, inaccurate pseudo labels of the target samples may yield suboptimal performance with error accumulation during the optimization process. Moreover, once the pseudo labels are generated, how to remedy the generated pseudo labels is far from explored. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve the accuracy of the pseudo labels in the target domain. It first generates coarse pseudo labels by a conventional UDA method. Then, it iteratively exploits the intra-class similarity of the target samples for improving the generated coarse pseudo labels, and aligns the source and target domains with the improved pseudo labels. The accuracy improvement of the pseudo labels is made by first deleting dissimilar samples, and then using spanning trees to eliminate the samples with the wrong pseudo labels in the intra-class samples. We have applied the proposed approach to several conventional UDA methods as an additional term. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can boost the accuracy of the pseudo labels and further lead to more discriminative and domain invariant features than the conventional baselines.
Knowledge distillation (KD) is an efficient approach to transfer the knowledge from a large "teacher" network to a smaller "student" network. Traditional KD methods require lots of labeled training samples and a white-box teacher (parameters are accessible) to train a good student. However, these resources are not always available in real-world applications. The distillation process often happens at an external party side where we do not have access to much data, and the teacher does not disclose its parameters due to security and privacy concerns. To overcome these challenges, we propose a black-box few-shot KD method to train the student with few unlabeled training samples and a black-box teacher. Our main idea is to expand the training set by generating a diverse set of out-of-distribution synthetic images using MixUp and a conditional variational auto-encoder. These synthetic images along with their labels obtained from the teacher are used to train the student. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms recent SOTA few/zero-shot KD methods on image classification tasks. The code and models are available at: //github.com/nphdang/FS-BBT
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 notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at //github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.
This paper addresses the difficulty of forecasting multiple financial time series (TS) conjointly using deep neural networks (DNN). We investigate whether DNN-based models could forecast these TS more efficiently by learning their representation directly. To this end, we make use of the dynamic factor graph (DFG) from that we enhance by proposing a novel variable-length attention-based mechanism to render it memory-augmented. Using this mechanism, we propose an unsupervised DNN architecture for multivariate TS forecasting that allows to learn and take advantage of the relationships between these TS. We test our model on two datasets covering 19 years of investment funds activities. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms significantly typical DNN-based and statistical models at forecasting their 21-day price trajectory.
The quest of `can machines think' and `can machines do what human do' are quests that drive the development of artificial intelligence. Although recent artificial intelligence succeeds in many data intensive applications, it still lacks the ability of learning from limited exemplars and fast generalizing to new tasks. To tackle this problem, one has to turn to machine learning, which supports the scientific study of artificial intelligence. Particularly, a machine learning problem called Few-Shot Learning (FSL) targets at this case. It can rapidly generalize to new tasks of limited supervised experience by turning to prior knowledge, which mimics human's ability to acquire knowledge from few examples through generalization and analogy. It has been seen as a test-bed for real artificial intelligence, a way to reduce laborious data gathering and computationally costly training, and antidote for rare cases learning. With extensive works on FSL emerging, we give a comprehensive survey for it. We first give the formal definition for FSL. Then we point out the core issues of FSL, which turns the problem from "how to solve FSL" to "how to deal with the core issues". Accordingly, existing works from the birth of FSL to the most recent published ones are categorized in a unified taxonomy, with thorough discussion of the pros and cons for different categories. Finally, we envision possible future directions for FSL in terms of problem setup, techniques, applications and theory, hoping to provide insights to both beginners and experienced researchers.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.