Recent work has shown the promise of creating generalist, transformer-based, policies for language, vision, and sequential decision-making problems. To create such models, we generally require centralized training objectives, data, and compute. It is of interest if we can more flexibly create generalist policies, by merging together multiple, task-specific, individually trained policies. In this work, we take a preliminary step in this direction through merging, or averaging, subsets of Decision Transformers in weight space trained on different MuJoCo locomotion problems, forming multi-task models without centralized training. We also propose that when merging policies, we can obtain better results if all policies start from common, pre-trained initializations, while also co-training on shared auxiliary tasks during problem-specific finetuning. In general, we believe research in this direction can help democratize and distribute the process of which forms generally capable agents.
In recent years, multitudes of researches have applied deep learning to automatic sleep stage classification. Whereas actually, these works have paid less attention to the issue of cross-subject in sleep staging. At the same time, emerging neuroscience theories on inter-subject correlations can provide new insights for cross-subject analysis. This paper presents the MViTime model that have been used in sleep staging study. And we implement the inter-subject correlation theory through contrastive learning, providing a feasible solution to address the cross-subject problem in sleep stage classification. Finally, experimental results and conclusions are presented, demonstrating that the developed method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on sleep staging. The results of the ablation experiment also demonstrate the effectiveness of the cross-subject approach based on contrastive learning.
In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieve the best performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While the first models were trained on general domain data, specialized ones have emerged to more effectively treat specific domains. In this paper, we propose an original study of PLMs in the medical domain on French language. We compare, for the first time, the performance of PLMs trained on both public data from the web and private data from healthcare establishments. We also evaluate different learning strategies on a set of biomedical tasks. In particular, we show that we can take advantage of already existing biomedical PLMs in a foreign language by further pre-train it on our targeted data. Finally, we release the first specialized PLMs for the biomedical field in French, called DrBERT, as well as the largest corpus of medical data under free license on which these models are trained.
Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (AED) are two widely used frameworks for speech-to-text tasks. They are designed for different purposes and each has its own benefits and drawbacks for speech-to-text tasks. In order to leverage strengths of both modeling methods, we propose a solution by combining Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks. The new method leverages AED's strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducer's streaming property. In the proposed framework, Transducer and AED share the same speech encoder. The predictor in Transducer is replaced by the decoder in the AED model, and the outputs of the decoder are conditioned on the speech inputs instead of outputs from an unconditioned language model. The proposed solution ensures that the model is optimized by covering all possible read/write scenarios and creates a matched environment for streaming applications. We evaluate the proposed approach on the \textsc{MuST-C} dataset and the findings demonstrate that TAED performs significantly better than Transducer for offline automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (ST) tasks. In the streaming case, TAED outperforms Transducer in the ASR task and one ST direction while comparable results are achieved in another translation direction.
Typical deep visual recognition models are capable of performing the one task they were trained on. In this paper, we tackle the extremely difficult problem of combining completely distinct models with different initializations, each solving a separate task, into one multi-task model without any additional training. Prior work in model merging permutes one model to the space of the other then adds them together. While this works for models trained on the same task, we find that this fails to account for the differences in models trained on disjoint tasks. Thus, we introduce "ZipIt!", a general method for merging two arbitrary models of the same architecture that incorporates two simple strategies. First, in order to account for features that aren't shared between models, we expand the model merging problem to additionally allow for merging features within each model by defining a general "zip" operation. Second, we add support for partially zipping the models up until a specified layer, naturally creating a multi-head model. We find that these two changes combined account for a staggering 20-60% improvement over prior work, making the merging of models trained on disjoint tasks feasible.
Obtaining high-quality data for collaborative training of machine learning models can be a challenging task due to A) the regulatory concerns and B) lack of incentive to participate. The first issue can be addressed through the use of privacy enhancing technologies (PET), one of the most frequently used one being differentially private (DP) training. The second challenge can be addressed by identifying which data points can be beneficial for model training and rewarding data owners for sharing this data. However, DP in deep learning typically adversely affects atypical (often informative) data samples, making it difficult to assess the usefulness of individual contributions. In this work we investigate how to leverage gradient information to identify training samples of interest in private training settings. We show that there exist techniques which are able to provide the clients with the tools for principled data selection even in strictest privacy settings.
Detecting plagiarism involves finding similar items in two different sources. In this article, we propose a novel method for detecting plagiarism that is based on attention mechanism-based long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) word embedding, enhanced with optimized differential evolution (DE) method for pre-training and a focal loss function for training. BERT could be included in a downstream task and fine-tuned as a task-specific BERT can be included in a downstream task and fine-tuned as a task-specific structure, while the trained BERT model is capable of detecting various linguistic characteristics. Unbalanced classification is one of the primary issues with plagiarism detection. We suggest a focal loss-based training technique that carefully learns minority class instances to solve this. Another issue that we tackle is the training phase itself, which typically employs gradient-based methods like back-propagation for the learning process and thus suffers from some drawbacks, including sensitivity to initialization. To initiate the BP process, we suggest a novel DE algorithm that makes use of a clustering-based mutation operator. Here, a winning cluster is identified for the current DE population, and a fresh updating method is used to produce potential answers. We evaluate our proposed approach on three benchmark datasets ( MSRP, SNLI, and SemEval2014) and demonstrate that it performs well when compared to both conventional and population-based methods.
Many reinforcement learning (RL) applications have combinatorial action spaces, where each action is a composition of sub-actions. A standard RL approach ignores this inherent factorization structure, resulting in a potential failure to make meaningful inferences about rarely observed sub-action combinations; this is particularly problematic for offline settings, where data may be limited. In this work, we propose a form of linear Q-function decomposition induced by factored action spaces. We study the theoretical properties of our approach, identifying scenarios where it is guaranteed to lead to zero bias when used to approximate the Q-function. Outside the regimes with theoretical guarantees, we show that our approach can still be useful because it leads to better sample efficiency without necessarily sacrificing policy optimality, allowing us to achieve a better bias-variance trade-off. Across several offline RL problems using simulators and real-world datasets motivated by healthcare, we demonstrate that incorporating factored action spaces into value-based RL can result in better-performing policies. Our approach can help an agent make more accurate inferences within underexplored regions of the state-action space when applying RL to observational datasets.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
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.