Fewer Truncations Improve Language Modeling

In large language model training, input documents are typically concatenated together and then split into sequences of equal length to avoid padding tokens. Despite its efficiency, the concatenation approach compromises data integrity -- it inevitably breaks many documents into incomplete pieces, leading to excessive truncations that hinder the model from learning to compose logically coherent and factually consistent content that is grounded on the complete context. To address the issue, we propose Best-fit Packing, a scalable and efficient method that packs documents into training sequences through length-aware combinatorial optimization. Our method completely eliminates unnecessary truncations while retaining the same training efficiency as concatenation. Empirical results from both text and code pre-training show that our method achieves superior performance (e.g., relatively +4.7% on reading comprehension; +16.8% in context following; and +9.2% on program synthesis), and reduces closed-domain hallucination effectively by up to 58.3%.

Taxonomy Expansion for Named Entity Recognition

Training a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model often involves fixing a taxonomy of entity types. However, requirements evolve and we might need the NER model to recognize additional entity types. A simple approach is to re-annotate entire dataset with both existing and additional entity types and then train the model on the re-annotated dataset. However, this is an extremely laborious task. To remedy this, we propose a novel approach called Partial Label Model (PLM) that uses only partially annotated datasets. We experiment with 6 diverse datasets and show that PLM consistently performs better than most other approaches (0.5 - 2.5 F1), including in novel settings for taxonomy expansion not considered in prior work. The gap between PLM and all other approaches is especially large in settings where there is limited data available for the additional entity types (as much as 11 F1), thus suggesting a more cost effective approaches to taxonomy expansion.

A Weak Supervision Approach for Few-Shot Aspect Based Sentiment

We explore how weak supervision on abundant unlabeled data can be leveraged to improve few-shot performance in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks. We propose a pipeline approach to construct a noisy ABSA dataset, and we use it to adapt a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model to the ABSA tasks. We test the resulting model on three widely used ABSA datasets, before and after fine-tuning. Our proposed method preserves the full fine-tuning performance while showing significant improvements (15.84% absolute F1) in the few-shot learning scenario for the harder tasks. In zero-shot (i.e., without fine-tuning), our method outperforms the previous state of the art on the aspect extraction sentiment classification (AESC) task and is, additionally, capable of performing the harder aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) task.

À-la-carte Prompt Tuning (APT): Combining Distinct Data Via Composable Prompting

We introduce \`A-la-carte Prompt Tuning (APT), a transformer-based scheme to tune prompts on distinct data so that they can be arbitrarily composed at inference time. The individual prompts can be trained in isolation, possibly on different devices, at different times, and on different distributions or domains. Furthermore each prompt only contains information about the subset of data it was exposed to during training. During inference, models can be assembled based on arbitrary selections of data sources, which we call "\`a-la-carte learning". \`A-la-carte learning enables constructing bespoke models specific to each user's individual access rights and preferences. We can add or remove information from the model by simply adding or removing the corresponding prompts without retraining from scratch. We demonstrate that \`a-la-carte built models achieve accuracy within $5\%$ of models trained on the union of the respective sources, with comparable cost in terms of training and inference time. For the continual learning benchmarks Split CIFAR-100 and CORe50, we achieve state-of-the-art performance.

DIVA: Dataset Derivative of a Learning Task

We present a method to compute the derivative of a learning task with respect to a dataset. A learning task is a function from a training set to the validation error, which can be represented by a trained deep neural network (DNN). The "dataset derivative" is a linear operator, computed around the trained model, that informs how perturbations of the weight of each training sample affect the validation error, usually computed on a separate validation dataset. Our method, DIVA (Differentiable Validation) hinges on a closed-form differentiable expression of the leave-one-out cross-validation error around a pre-trained DNN. Such expression constitutes the dataset derivative. DIVA could be used for dataset auto-curation, for example removing samples with faulty annotations, augmenting a dataset with additional relevant samples, or rebalancing. More generally, DIVA can be used to optimize the dataset, along with the parameters of the model, as part of the training process without the need for a separate validation dataset, unlike bi-level optimization methods customary in AutoML. To illustrate the flexibility of DIVA, we report experiments on sample auto-curation tasks such as outlier rejection, dataset extension, and automatic aggregation of multi-modal data.

Structured Prediction as Translation between Augmented Natural Languages

We propose a new framework, Translation between Augmented Natural Languages (TANL), to solve many structured prediction language tasks including joint entity and relation extraction, nested named entity recognition, relation classification, semantic role labeling, event extraction, coreference resolution, and dialogue state tracking. Instead of tackling the problem by training task-specific discriminative classifiers, we frame it as a translation task between augmented natural languages, from which the task-relevant information can be easily extracted. Our approach can match or outperform task-specific models on all tasks, and in particular, achieves new state-of-the-art results on joint entity and relation extraction (CoNLL04, ADE, NYT, and ACE2005 datasets), relation classification (FewRel and TACRED), and semantic role labeling (CoNLL-2005 and CoNLL-2012). We accomplish this while using the same architecture and hyperparameters for all tasks and even when training a single model to solve all tasks at the same time (multi-task learning). Finally, we show that our framework can also significantly improve the performance in a low-resource regime, thanks to better use of label semantics.

Estimating informativeness of samples with Smooth Unique Information

We define a notion of information that an individual sample provides to the training of a neural network, and we specialize it to measure both how much a sample informs the final weights and how much it informs the function computed by the weights. Though related, we show that these quantities have a qualitatively different behavior. We give efficient approximations of these quantities using a linearized network and demonstrate empirically that the approximation is accurate for real-world architectures, such as pre-trained ResNets. We apply these measures to several problems, such as dataset summarization, analysis of under-sampled classes, comparison of informativeness of different data sources, and detection of adversarial and corrupted examples. Our work generalizes existing frameworks but enjoys better computational properties for heavily over-parametrized models, which makes it possible to apply it to real-world networks.

The Information Complexity of Learning Tasks, their Structure and their Distance

We introduce an asymmetric distance in the space of learning tasks, and a framework to compute their complexity. These concepts are foundational to the practice of transfer learning, ubiquitous in Deep Learning, whereby a parametric model is pre-trained for a task, and then used for another after fine-tuning. The framework we develop is intrinsically non-asymptotic, capturing the finite nature of the training dataset, yet it allows distinguishing learning from memorization. It encompasses, as special cases, classical notions from Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon, and Fisher Information. However, unlike some of those frameworks, it can be applied easily to large-scale models and real-world datasets. It is the first framework to explicitly account for the optimization scheme, which plays a crucial role in Deep Learning, in measuring complexity and information.