Prompting method is regarded as one of the crucial progress for few-shot nature language processing. Recent research on prompting moves from discrete tokens based ``hard prompts'' to continuous ``soft prompts'', which employ learnable vectors as pseudo prompt tokens and achieve better performance. Though showing promising prospects, these soft-prompting methods are observed to rely heavily on good initialization to take effect. Unfortunately, obtaining a perfect initialization for soft prompts requires understanding of inner language models working and elaborate design, which is no easy task and has to restart from scratch for each new task. To remedy this, we propose a generalized soft prompting method called MetaPrompting, which adopts the well-recognized model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm to automatically find better prompt initialization that facilitates fast adaptation to new prompting tasks.Extensive experiments show MetaPrompting tackles soft prompt initialization problem and brings significant improvement on four different datasets (over 6 points improvement in accuracy for 1-shot setting), achieving new state-of-the-art performance.
With the surge of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs), fine-tuning these models to numerous downstream tasks becomes a crucial problem. Consequently, parameter efficient transfer learning (PETL) of large models has grasped huge attention. While recent PETL methods showcase impressive performance, they rely on optimistic assumptions: 1) the entire parameter set of a PTM is available, and 2) a sufficiently large memory capacity for the fine-tuning is equipped. However, in most real-world applications, PTMs are served as a black-box API or proprietary software without explicit parameter accessibility. Besides, it is hard to meet a large memory requirement for modern PTMs. In this work, we propose black-box visual prompting (BlackVIP), which efficiently adapts the PTMs without knowledge about model architectures and parameters. BlackVIP has two components; 1) Coordinator and 2) simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation with gradient correction (SPSA-GC). The Coordinator designs input-dependent image-shaped visual prompts, which improves few-shot adaptation and robustness on distribution/location shift. SPSA-GC efficiently estimates the gradient of a target model to update Coordinator. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that BlackVIP enables robust adaptation to diverse domains without accessing PTMs' parameters, with minimal memory requirements. Code: \url{//github.com/changdaeoh/BlackVIP}
The spread of rumors along with breaking events seriously hinders the truth in the era of social media. Previous studies reveal that due to the lack of annotated resources, rumors presented in minority languages are hard to be detected. Furthermore, the unforeseen breaking events not involved in yesterday's news exacerbate the scarcity of data resources. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot framework based on prompt learning to detect rumors falling in different domains or presented in different languages. More specifically, we firstly represent rumor circulated on social media as diverse propagation threads, then design a hierarchical prompt encoding mechanism to learn language-agnostic contextual representations for both prompts and rumor data. To further enhance domain adaptation, we model the domain-invariant structural features from the propagation threads, to incorporate structural position representations of influential community response. In addition, a new virtual response augmentation method is used to improve model training. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for detecting rumors at early stages.
Large language models have demonstrated surprising ability to perform in-context learning, i.e., these models can be directly applied to solve numerous downstream tasks by conditioning on a prompt constructed by a few input-output examples. However, prior research has shown that in-context learning can suffer from high instability due to variations in training examples, example order, and prompt formats. Therefore, the construction of an appropriate prompt is essential for improving the performance of in-context learning. In this paper, we revisit this problem from the view of predictive bias. Specifically, we introduce a metric to evaluate the predictive bias of a fixed prompt against labels or a given attributes. Then we empirically show that prompts with higher bias always lead to unsatisfactory predictive quality. Based on this observation, we propose a novel search strategy based on the greedy search to identify the near-optimal prompt for improving the performance of in-context learning. We perform comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art mainstream models such as GPT-3 on various downstream tasks. Our results indicate that our method can enhance the model's in-context learning performance in an effective and interpretable manner.
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on billion-level data have learned general visual representations and broad visual concepts. In principle, the well-learned knowledge structure of the VLMs should be inherited appropriately when being transferred to downstream tasks with limited data. However, most existing efficient transfer learning (ETL) approaches for VLMs either damage or are excessively biased towards the prior knowledge, e.g., prompt tuning (PT) discards the pre-trained text-based classifier and builds a new one while adapter-style tuning (AT) fully relies on the pre-trained features. To address this, we propose a new efficient tuning approach for VLMs named Task Residual Tuning (TaskRes), which performs directly on the text-based classifier and explicitly decouples the prior knowledge of the pre-trained models and new knowledge regarding a target task. Specifically, TaskRes keeps the original classifier weights from the VLMs frozen and obtains a new classifier for the target task by tuning a set of prior-independent parameters as a residual to the original one, which enables reliable prior knowledge preservation and flexible task-specific knowledge exploration. The proposed TaskRes is simple yet effective, which significantly outperforms previous ETL methods (e.g., PT and AT) on 11 benchmark datasets while requiring minimal effort for the implementation. Our code is available at //github.com/geekyutao/TaskRes.
Conventionally, since the natural language action space is astronomical, approximate dynamic programming applied to dialogue generation involves policy improvement with action sampling. However, such a practice is inefficient for reinforcement learning (RL) because the eligible (high action value) responses are very sparse, and the greedy policy sustained by the random sampling is flabby. This paper shows that the performance of dialogue policy positively correlated with sampling size by theoretical and experimental. We introduce a novel dual-granularity Q-function to alleviate this limitation by exploring the most promising response category to intervene in the sampling. It extracts the actions following the grained hierarchy, which can achieve the optimum with fewer policy iterations. Our approach learns in the way of offline RL from multiple reward functions designed to recognize human emotional details. Empirical studies demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the baseline methods. Further verification presents that ours can generate responses with higher expected rewards and controllability.
We present prompt distribution learning for effectively adapting a pre-trained vision-language model to address downstream recognition tasks. Our method not only learns low-bias prompts from a few samples but also captures the distribution of diverse prompts to handle the varying visual representations. In this way, we provide high-quality task-related content for facilitating recognition. This prompt distribution learning is realized by an efficient approach that learns the output embeddings of prompts instead of the input embeddings. Thus, we can employ a Gaussian distribution to model them effectively and derive a surrogate loss for efficient training. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, with 1 sample per category, it relatively improves the average result by 9.1% compared to human-crafted prompts.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.