The Embodied AI community has made significant strides in visual navigation tasks, exploring targets from 3D coordinates, objects, language descriptions, and images. However, these navigation models often handle only a single input modality as the target. With the progress achieved so far, it is time to move towards universal navigation models capable of handling various goal types, enabling more effective user interaction with robots. To facilitate this goal, we propose GOAT-Bench, a benchmark for the universal navigation task referred to as GO to AnyThing (GOAT). In this task, the agent is directed to navigate to a sequence of targets specified by the category name, language description, or image in an open-vocabulary fashion. We benchmark monolithic RL and modular methods on the GOAT task, analyzing their performance across modalities, the role of explicit and implicit scene memories, their robustness to noise in goal specifications, and the impact of memory in lifelong scenarios.
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.
The promise of multimodal models for real-world applications has inspired research in visualizing and understanding their internal mechanics with the end goal of empowering stakeholders to visualize model behavior, perform model debugging, and promote trust in machine learning models. However, modern multimodal models are typically black-box neural networks, which makes it challenging to understand their internal mechanics. How can we visualize the internal modeling of multimodal interactions in these models? Our paper aims to fill this gap by proposing MultiViz, a method for analyzing the behavior of multimodal models by scaffolding the problem of interpretability into 4 stages: (1) unimodal importance: how each modality contributes towards downstream modeling and prediction, (2) cross-modal interactions: how different modalities relate with each other, (3) multimodal representations: how unimodal and cross-modal interactions are represented in decision-level features, and (4) multimodal prediction: how decision-level features are composed to make a prediction. MultiViz is designed to operate on diverse modalities, models, tasks, and research areas. Through experiments on 8 trained models across 6 real-world tasks, we show that the complementary stages in MultiViz together enable users to (1) simulate model predictions, (2) assign interpretable concepts to features, (3) perform error analysis on model misclassifications, and (4) use insights from error analysis to debug models. MultiViz is publicly available, will be regularly updated with new interpretation tools and metrics, and welcomes inputs from the community.
PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts. Prompts are functions that map an example from a dataset to a natural language input and target output. Using prompts to train and query language models is an emerging area in NLP that requires new tools that let users develop and refine these prompts collaboratively. PromptSource addresses the emergent challenges in this new setting with (1) a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, (2) an interface that lets users quickly iterate on prompt development by observing outputs of their prompts on many examples, and (3) a community-driven set of guidelines for contributing new prompts to a common pool. Over 2,000 prompts for roughly 170 datasets are already available in PromptSource. PromptSource is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.
Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks. It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language model training. Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? To test this question at scale, we develop a system for easily mapping general natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts using varying natural language. These prompted datasets allow for benchmarking the ability of a model to perform completely unseen tasks specified in natural language. We fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets, often outperforming models 16x its size. Further, our approach attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, outperforming models 6x its size. All prompts and trained models are available at github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource/.
The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.
In this work, we present to the NLP community, and to the wider research community as a whole, an application for the diachronic analysis of research corpora. We open source an easy-to-use tool coined: DRIFT, which allows researchers to track research trends and development over the years. The analysis methods are collated from well-cited research works, with a few of our own methods added for good measure. Succinctly put, some of the analysis methods are: keyword extraction, word clouds, predicting declining/stagnant/growing trends using Productivity, tracking bi-grams using Acceleration plots, finding the Semantic Drift of words, tracking trends using similarity, etc. To demonstrate the utility and efficacy of our tool, we perform a case study on the cs.CL corpus of the arXiv repository and draw inferences from the analysis methods. The toolkit and the associated code are available here: https://github.com/rajaswa/DRIFT.
Superpixels are higher-order perceptual groups of pixels in an image, often carrying much more information than raw pixels. There is an inherent relational structure to the relationship among different superpixels of an image. This relational information can convey some form of domain information about the image, e.g. relationship between superpixels representing two eyes in a cat image. Our interest in this paper is to construct computer vision models, specifically those based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to incorporate these superpixels information. We propose a methodology to construct a hybrid model that leverages (a) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to deal with spatial information in an image, and (b) Graph Neural Network (GNN) to deal with relational superpixel information in the image. The proposed deep model is learned using a generic hybrid loss function that we call a `hybrid' loss. We evaluate the predictive performance of our proposed hybrid vision model on four popular image classification datasets: MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Moreover, we evaluate our method on three real-world classification tasks: COVID-19 X-Ray Detection, LFW Face Recognition, and SOCOFing Fingerprint Identification. The results demonstrate that the relational superpixel information provided via a GNN could improve the performance of standard CNN-based vision systems.
In this article, we present our methodologies for SemEval-2021 Task-4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning. Given a fill-in-the-blank-type question and a corresponding context, the task is to predict the most suitable word from a list of 5 options. There are three sub-tasks within this task: Imperceptibility (subtask-I), Non-Specificity (subtask-II), and Intersection (subtask-III). We use encoders of transformers-based models pre-trained on the masked language modelling (MLM) task to build our Fill-in-the-blank (FitB) models. Moreover, to model imperceptibility, we define certain linguistic features, and to model non-specificity, we leverage information from hypernyms and hyponyms provided by a lexical database. Specifically, for non-specificity, we try out augmentation techniques, and other statistical techniques. We also propose variants, namely Chunk Voting and Max Context, to take care of input length restrictions for BERT, etc. Additionally, we perform a thorough ablation study, and use Integrated Gradients to explain our predictions on a few samples. Our best submissions achieve accuracies of 75.31% and 77.84%, on the test sets for subtask-I and subtask-II, respectively. For subtask-III, we achieve accuracies of 65.64% and 62.27%.