We propose an unsupervised method to extract keywords and keyphrases from texts based on a pre-trained language model (LM) and Shannon's information maximization. Specifically, our method extracts phrases having the highest conditional entropy under the LM. The resulting set of keyphrases turns out to solve a relevant information-theoretic problem: if provided as side information, it leads to the expected minimal binary code length in compressing the text using the LM and an entropy encoder. Alternately, the resulting set is an approximation via a causal LM to the set of phrases that minimize the entropy of the text when conditioned upon it. Empirically, the method provides results comparable to the most commonly used methods in various keyphrase extraction benchmark challenges.
Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. However, a significant challenge nowadays is maintaining performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labelled samples. We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation. Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks. Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are 7.6 times smaller and 4.8 times faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance. We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.
Large language models (LLMs) represented by chartGPT have achieved profound applications and breakthroughs in various fields. This demonstrates that LLMs with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters will continue to transform our daily lives. However, training LLMs with super-large-scale parameters requires even larger and high-performance GPU clusters and continuous training periods lasting for months. Due to the inevitable hardware and software failures in large clusters, maintaining large-scale training sessions lasting more than a week has become extremely challenging. A significant amount of time is spent on tasks such as checkpoint saving and recovery, task restart submissions, and task anomaly checks, greatly reducing the efficiency of effective training. To address these issues, a novel fault-tolerant large model training system has been proposed, which we named TRANSOM. In this work, we have designed three key components: the Training pipeline Automatic Fault Tolerance and Recovery Mechanism (TOL), the Training Task Multi-dimensional Metric Automatic Anomaly Detection System (TEE), and the Training Checkpoint Asynchronous Access Automatic Fault Tolerance and Recovery Technology (TCE). Our preliminary results indicate that TRANSOM significantly accelerates the efficiency of large-scale LLMs training on clusters. For instance, the pre-training time for GPT-3 with 175B parameters has been reduced by 28%, and the checkpoint storage and recovery performance has improved by a factor of 20.
A Retrieval-Augmented Language Model (RALM) augments a generative language model by retrieving context-specific knowledge from an external database. This strategy facilitates impressive text generation quality even with smaller models, thus reducing orders of magnitude of computational demands. However, RALMs introduce unique system design challenges due to (a) the diverse workload characteristics between LM inference and retrieval and (b) the various system requirements and bottlenecks for different RALM configurations such as model sizes, database sizes, and retrieval frequencies. We propose Chameleon, a heterogeneous accelerator system that integrates both LM and retrieval accelerators in a disaggregated architecture. The heterogeneity ensures efficient acceleration of both LM inference and retrieval, while the accelerator disaggregation enables the system to independently scale both types of accelerators to fulfill diverse RALM requirements. Our Chameleon prototype implements retrieval accelerators on FPGAs and assigns LM inference to GPUs, with a CPU server orchestrating these accelerators over the network. Compared to CPU-based and CPU-GPU vector search systems, Chameleon achieves up to 23.72x speedup and 26.2x energy efficiency. Evaluated on various RALMs, Chameleon exhibits up to 2.16x reduction in latency and 3.18x speedup in throughput compared to the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. These promising results pave the way for bringing accelerator heterogeneity and disaggregation into future RALM systems.
Joint speech-language training is challenging due to the large demand for training data and GPU consumption, as well as the modality gap between speech and language. We present ComSL, a speech-language model built atop a composite architecture of public pretrained speech-only and language-only models and optimized data-efficiently for spoken language tasks. Particularly, we propose to incorporate cross-modality learning into transfer learning and conduct them simultaneously for downstream tasks in a multi-task learning manner. Our approach has demonstrated effectiveness in end-to-end speech-to-text translation tasks, achieving a new state-of-the-art average BLEU score of 31.5 on the multilingual speech to English text translation task for 21 languages, as measured on the public CoVoST2 evaluation set.
The objective of Entity Alignment (EA) is to identify equivalent entity pairs from multiple Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and create a more comprehensive and unified KG. The majority of EA methods have primarily focused on the structural modality of KGs, lacking exploration of multi-modal information. A few multi-modal EA methods have made good attempts in this field. Still, they have two shortcomings: (1) inconsistent and inefficient modality modeling that designs complex and distinct models for each modality; (2) ineffective modality fusion due to the heterogeneous nature of modalities in EA. To tackle these challenges, we propose PathFusion, consisting of two main components: (1) MSP, a unified modeling approach that simplifies the alignment process by constructing paths connecting entities and modality nodes to represent multiple modalities; (2) IRF, an iterative fusion method that effectively combines information from different modalities using the path as an information carrier. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of PathFusion over state-of-the-art methods, with 22.4%-28.9% absolute improvement on Hits@1, and 0.194-0.245 absolute improvement on MRR.
Large language models (LLMs) have been used for diverse tasks in natural language processing (NLP), yet remain under-explored for task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS), especially for end-to-end TODS. We present InstructTODS, a novel off-the-shelf framework for zero-shot end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems that can adapt to diverse domains without fine-tuning. By leveraging LLMs, InstructTODS generates a proxy belief state that seamlessly translates user intentions into dynamic queries for efficient interaction with any KB. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that InstructTODS achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned TODS in guiding dialogues to successful completion without prior knowledge or task-specific data. Furthermore, a rigorous human evaluation of end-to-end TODS shows that InstructTODS produces dialogue responses that notably outperform both the gold responses and the state-of-the-art TODS in terms of helpfulness, informativeness, and humanness. Moreover, the effectiveness of LLMs in TODS is further supported by our comprehensive evaluations on TODS subtasks: dialogue state tracking, intent classification, and response generation. Code and implementations could be found here //github.com/WillyHC22/InstructTODS/
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
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.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively.