Solving symbolic mathematics has always been of in the arena of human ingenuity that needs compositional reasoning and recurrence. However, recent studies have shown that large-scale language models such as transformers are universal and surprisingly can be trained as a sequence-to-sequence task to solve complex mathematical equations. These large transformer models need humongous amounts of training data to generalize to unseen symbolic mathematics problems. In this paper, we present a sample efficient way of solving the symbolic tasks by first pretraining the transformer model with language translation and then fine-tuning the pretrained transformer model to solve the downstream task of symbolic mathematics. We achieve comparable accuracy on the integration task with our pretrained model while using around $1.5$ orders of magnitude less number of training samples with respect to the state-of-the-art deep learning for symbolic mathematics. The test accuracy on differential equation tasks is considerably lower comparing with integration as they need higher order recursions that are not present in language translations. We pretrain our model with different pairs of language translations. Our results show language bias in solving symbolic mathematics tasks. Finally, we study the robustness of the fine-tuned model on symbolic math tasks against distribution shift, and our approach generalizes better in distribution shift scenarios for the function integration.
In this paper we aim to investigate the mechanisms that guide text generation with pre-trained Transformer-based Language Models (TLMs). Grounded on the Product of Experts formulation by Hinton (1999), we describe a generative mechanism that exploits expert units which naturally exist in TLMs. Such units are responsible for detecting concepts in the input and conditioning text generation on such concepts. We describe how to identify expert units and how to activate them during inference in order to induce any desired concept in the generated output. We find that the activation of a surprisingly small amount of units is sufficient to steer text generation (as little as 3 units in a model with 345M parameters). While the objective of this work is to learn more about how TLMs work, we show that our method is effective for conditioning without fine-tuning or using extra parameters, even on fine-grained homograph concepts. Additionally, we show that our method can be used to correct gender bias present in the output of TLMs and achieves gender parity for all evaluated contexts. We compare our method with FUDGE and PPLM-BoW, and show that our approach is able to achieve gender parity at a lower perplexity. The proposed method is accessible to a wide audience thanks to its simplicity and minimal compute needs. The findings in this paper are a step forward in understanding the generative mechanisms of TLMs.
We present LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. LaMDA is a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137B parameters and are pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text. While model scaling alone can improve quality, it shows less improvements on safety and factual grounding. We demonstrate that fine-tuning with annotated data and enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources can lead to significant improvements towards the two key challenges of safety and factual grounding. The first challenge, safety, involves ensuring that the model's responses are consistent with a set of human values, such as preventing harmful suggestions and unfair bias. We quantify safety using a metric based on an illustrative set of human values, and we find that filtering candidate responses using a LaMDA classifier fine-tuned with a small amount of crowdworker-annotated data offers a promising approach to improving model safety. The second challenge, factual grounding, involves enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a language translator, and a calculator. We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that our approach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responses that merely sound plausible. Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education and content recommendations, and analyze their helpfulness and role consistency.
Large, pre-trained transformer-based language models such as BERT have drastically changed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. We present a survey of recent work that uses these large language models to solve NLP tasks via pre-training then fine-tuning, prompting, or text generation approaches. We also present approaches that use pre-trained language models to generate data for training augmentation or other purposes. We conclude with discussions on limitations and suggested directions for future research.
Transformer-based pretrained language models (T-PTLMs) have achieved great success in almost every NLP task. The evolution of these models started with GPT and BERT. These models are built on the top of transformers, self-supervised learning and transfer learning. Transformed-based PTLMs learn universal language representations from large volumes of text data using self-supervised learning and transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. These models provide good background knowledge to downstream tasks which avoids training of downstream models from scratch. In this comprehensive survey paper, we initially give a brief overview of self-supervised learning. Next, we explain various core concepts like pretraining, pretraining methods, pretraining tasks, embeddings and downstream adaptation methods. Next, we present a new taxonomy of T-PTLMs and then give brief overview of various benchmarks including both intrinsic and extrinsic. We present a summary of various useful libraries to work with T-PTLMs. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions which will further improve these models. We strongly believe that this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good reference to learn the core concepts as well as to stay updated with the recent happenings in T-PTLMs.
The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-labels word alignments for parallel sentences. Then we randomly mask tokens in a bitext pair. Given a masked token, the model uses a pointer network to predict the aligned token in the other language. We alternately perform the above two steps in an expectation-maximization manner. Experimental results show that our method improves cross-lingual transferability on various datasets, especially on the token-level tasks, such as question answering, and structured prediction. Moreover, the model can serve as a pretrained word aligner, which achieves reasonably low error rates on the alignment benchmarks. The code and pretrained parameters are available at //github.com/CZWin32768/XLM-Align.
In this work, we construct the largest dataset for multimodal pretraining in Chinese, which consists of over 1.9TB images and 292GB texts that cover a wide range of domains. We propose a cross-modal pretraining method called M6, referring to Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer, for unified pretraining on the data of single modality and multiple modalities. We scale the model size up to 10 billion and 100 billion parameters, and build the largest pretrained model in Chinese. We apply the model to a series of downstream applications, and demonstrate its outstanding performance in comparison with strong baselines. Furthermore, we specifically design a downstream task of text-guided image generation, and show that the finetuned M6 can create high-quality images with high resolution and abundant details.
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.
We propose UniViLM: a Unified Video and Language pre-training Model for multimodal understanding and generation. Motivated by the recent success of BERT based pre-training technique for NLP and image-language tasks, VideoBERT and CBT are proposed to exploit BERT model for video and language pre-training using narrated instructional videos. Different from their works which only pre-train understanding task, we propose a unified video-language pre-training model for both understanding and generation tasks. Our model comprises of 4 components including two single-modal encoders, a cross encoder and a decoder with the Transformer backbone. We first pre-train our model to learn the universal representation for both video and language on a large instructional video dataset. Then we fine-tune the model on two multimodal tasks including understanding task (text-based video retrieval) and generation task (multimodal video captioning). Our extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both understanding and generation tasks and achieves the state-of-the art results.
Recent progress in pretraining language models on large textual corpora led to a surge of improvements for downstream NLP tasks. Whilst learning linguistic knowledge, these models may also be storing relational knowledge present in the training data, and may be able to answer queries structured as "fill-in-the-blank" cloze statements. Language models have many advantages over structured knowledge bases: they require no schema engineering, allow practitioners to query about an open class of relations, are easy to extend to more data, and require no human supervision to train. We present an in-depth analysis of the relational knowledge already present (without fine-tuning) in a wide range of state-of-the-art pretrained language models. We find that (i) without fine-tuning, BERT contains relational knowledge competitive with traditional NLP methods that have some access to oracle knowledge, (ii) BERT also does remarkably well on open-domain question answering against a supervised baseline, and (iii) certain types of factual knowledge are learned much more readily than others by standard language model pretraining approaches. The surprisingly strong ability of these models to recall factual knowledge without any fine-tuning demonstrates their potential as unsupervised open-domain QA systems. The code to reproduce our analysis is available at //github.com/facebookresearch/LAMA.
We present a new approach for pretraining a bi-directional transformer model that provides significant performance gains across a variety of language understanding problems. Our model solves a cloze-style word reconstruction task, where each word is ablated and must be predicted given the rest of the text. Experiments demonstrate large performance gains on GLUE and new state of the art results on NER as well as constituency parsing benchmarks, consistent with the concurrently introduced BERT model. We also present a detailed analysis of a number of factors that contribute to effective pretraining, including data domain and size, model capacity, and variations on the cloze objective.