Expressing universal semantics common to all languages is helpful in understanding the meanings of complex and culture-specific sentences. The research theme underlying this scenario focuses on learning universal representations across languages with the usage of massive parallel corpora. However, due to the sparsity and scarcity of parallel data, there is still a big challenge in learning authentic ``universals'' for any two languages. In this paper, we propose EMMA-X: an EM-like Multilingual pre-training Algorithm, to learn (X)Cross-lingual universals with the aid of excessive multilingual non-parallel data. EMMA-X unifies the cross-lingual representation learning task and an extra semantic relation prediction task within an EM framework. Both the extra semantic classifier and the cross-lingual sentence encoder approximate the semantic relation of two sentences, and supervise each other until convergence. To evaluate EMMA-X, we conduct experiments on XRETE, a newly introduced benchmark containing 12 widely studied cross-lingual tasks that fully depend on sentence-level representations. Results reveal that EMMA-X achieves state-of-the-art performance. Further geometric analysis of the built representation space with three requirements demonstrates the superiority of EMMA-X over advanced models.
Large language models (LLMs) can be used as accessible and intelligent chatbots by constructing natural language queries and directly inputting the prompt into the large language model. However, different prompt' constructions often lead to uncertainty in the answers and thus make it hard to utilize the specific knowledge of LLMs (like ChatGPT). To alleviate this, we use an interpretable structure to explain the prompt learning principle in LLMs, which certificates that the effectiveness of language models is determined by position changes of the task's related tokens. Therefore, we propose MTPrompt, a multi-dimensional task prompt learning method consisting based on task-related object, summary, and task description information. By automatically building and searching for appropriate prompts, our proposed MTPrompt achieves the best results on few-shot samples setting and five different datasets. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method in different experimental settings and ablation experiments. In interaction with large language models, embedding more task-related information into prompts will make it easier to stimulate knowledge embedded in large language models.
Code pre-trained language models (CPLMs) have received great attention since they can benefit various tasks that facilitate software development and maintenance. However, CPLMs are trained on massive open-source code, raising concerns about potential data infringement. This paper launches the first study of detecting unauthorized code use in CPLMs, i.e., Code Membership Inference (CMI) task. We design a framework Buzzer for different settings of CMI. Buzzer deploys several inference techniques, including distilling the target CPLM, ensemble inference, and unimodal and bimodal calibration. Extensive experiments show that CMI can be achieved with high accuracy using Buzzer. Hence, Buzzer can serve as a CMI tool and help protect intellectual property rights.
Recent advances in multimodal learning has resulted in powerful vision-language models, whose representations are generalizable across a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, their generalization ability has been further extended by incorporating trainable prompts, borrowed from the natural language processing literature. While such prompt learning techniques have shown impressive results, we identify that these prompts are trained based on global image features which limits itself in two aspects: First, by using global features, these prompts could be focusing less on the discriminative foreground image, resulting in poor generalization to various out-of-distribution test cases. Second, existing work weights all prompts equally whereas intuitively, prompts should be reweighed according to the semantics of the image. We address these as part of our proposed Contextual Prompt Learning (CoPL) framework, capable of aligning the prompts to the localized features of the image. Our key innovations over earlier works include using local image features as part of the prompt learning process, and more crucially, learning to weight these prompts based on local features that are appropriate for the task at hand. This gives us dynamic prompts that are both aligned to local image features as well as aware of local contextual relationships. Our extensive set of experiments on a variety of standard and few-shot datasets show that our method produces substantially improved performance when compared to the current state of the art methods. We also demonstrate both few-shot and out-of-distribution performance to establish the utility of learning dynamic prompts that are aligned to local image features.
Resources in high-resource languages have not been efficiently exploited in low-resource languages to solve language-dependent research problems. Spanish and French are considered high resource languages in which an adequate level of data resources for informal online social behavior modeling, is observed. However, a machine translation system to access those data resources and transfer their context and tone to a low-resource language like dialectal Arabic, does not exist. In response, we propose a framework that localizes contents of high-resource languages to a low-resource language/dialects by utilizing AI power. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to provide a parallel translation dataset from/to informal Spanish and French to/from informal Arabic dialects. Using this, we aim to enrich the under-resource-status dialectal Arabic and fast-track the research of diverse online social behaviors within and across smart cities in different geo-regions. The experimental results have illustrated the capability of our proposed solution in exploiting the resources between high and low resource languages and dialects. Not only this, but it has also been proven that ignoring dialects within the same language could lead to misleading analysis of online social behavior.
We advocate the idea of the natural-language-driven(NLD) simulation to efficiently produce the object interactions between multiple objects in the virtual road scenes, for teaching and testing the autonomous driving systems that should take quick action to avoid collision with obstacles with unpredictable motions. The NLD simulation allows the brief natural-language description to control the object interactions, significantly reducing the human efforts for creating a large amount of interaction data. To facilitate the research of NLD simulation, we collect the Language-to-Interaction(L2I) benchmark dataset with 120,000 natural-language descriptions of object interactions in 6 common types of road topologies. Each description is associated with the programming code, which the graphic render can use to visually reconstruct the object interactions in the virtual scenes. As a methodology contribution, we design SimCopilot to translate the interaction descriptions to the renderable code. We use the L2I dataset to evaluate SimCopilot's abilities to control the object motions, generate complex interactions, and generalize interactions across road topologies. The L2I dataset and the evaluation results motivate the relevant research of the NLD simulation.
Idiomatic expression (IE) processing and comprehension have challenged pre-trained language models (PTLMs) because their meanings are non-compositional. Unlike prior works that enable IE comprehension through fine-tuning PTLMs with sentences containing IEs, in this work, we construct IEKG, a commonsense knowledge graph for figurative interpretations of IEs. This extends the established ATOMIC2020 graph, converting PTLMs into knowledge models (KMs) that encode and infer commonsense knowledge related to IE use. Experiments show that various PTLMs can be converted into KMs with IEKG. We verify the quality of IEKG and the ability of the trained KMs with automatic and human evaluation. Through applications in natural language understanding, we show that a PTLM injected with knowledge from IEKG exhibits improved IE comprehension ability and can generalize to IEs unseen during training.
Attention-free language models that combine gating and convolutions are growing in popularity due to their efficiency and increasingly competitive performance. To better understand these architectures, we pretrain a suite of 17 attention and "gated-convolution" language models, finding that SoTA gated-convolution architectures still underperform attention by up to 2.1 perplexity points on the Pile. In fine-grained analysis, we find 82% of the gap is explained by each model's ability to recall information that is previously mentioned in-context, e.g. "Hakuna Matata means no worries Hakuna Matata it means no" $\rightarrow$ "??". On this task, termed "associative recall", we find that attention outperforms gated-convolutions by a large margin: a 70M parameter attention model outperforms a 1.4 billion parameter gated-convolution model on associative recall. This is surprising because prior work shows gated convolutions can perfectly solve synthetic tests for AR capability. To close the gap between synthetics and real language, we develop a new formalization of the task called multi-query associative recall (MQAR) that better reflects actual language. We perform an empirical and theoretical study of MQAR that elucidates differences in the parameter-efficiency of attention and gated-convolution recall. Informed by our analysis, we evaluate simple convolution-attention hybrids and show that hybrids with input-dependent sparse attention patterns can close 97.4% of the gap to attention, while maintaining sub-quadratic scaling. Our code is accessible at: //github.com/HazyResearch/zoology.
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.
Recent VQA models may tend to rely on language bias as a shortcut and thus fail to sufficiently learn the multi-modal knowledge from both vision and language. In this paper, we investigate how to capture and mitigate language bias in VQA. Motivated by causal effects, we proposed a novel counterfactual inference framework, which enables us to capture the language bias as the direct causal effect of questions on answers and reduce the language bias by subtracting the direct language effect from the total causal effect. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed counterfactual inference framework 1) is general to various VQA backbones and fusion strategies, 2) achieves competitive performance on the language-bias sensitive VQA-CP dataset while performs robustly on the balanced VQA v2 dataset.
For languages with no annotated resources, transferring knowledge from rich-resource languages is an effective solution for named entity recognition (NER). While all existing methods directly transfer from source-learned model to a target language, in this paper, we propose to fine-tune the learned model with a few similar examples given a test case, which could benefit the prediction by leveraging the structural and semantic information conveyed in such similar examples. To this end, we present a meta-learning algorithm to find a good model parameter initialization that could fast adapt to the given test case and propose to construct multiple pseudo-NER tasks for meta-training by computing sentence similarities. To further improve the model's generalization ability across different languages, we introduce a masking scheme and augment the loss function with an additional maximum term during meta-training. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-lingual named entity recognition with minimal resources over five target languages. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across the board.