Naive Bayes-based Context Extension for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising in-context learning abilities. However, conventional In-Context Learning (ICL) approaches are often impeded by length limitations of transformer architecture, which pose challenges when attempting to effectively integrate supervision from a substantial number of demonstration examples. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called Naive Bayes-based Context Extension (NBCE), to enable existing LLMs to perform ICL with an increased number of demonstrations by significantly expanding their context size. Importantly, this expansion does not require fine-tuning or dependence on particular model architectures, all the while preserving linear efficiency. NBCE initially splits the context into equal-sized windows fitting the target LLM's maximum length. Then, it introduces a voting mechanism to select the most relevant window, regarded as the posterior context. Finally, it employs Bayes' theorem to generate the test task. Our experimental results demonstrate that NBCE substantially enhances performance, particularly as the number of demonstration examples increases, consistently outperforming alternative methods. The NBCE code will be made publicly accessible. The code NBCE is available at: https://github.com/amurtadha/NBCE-master

VisionLLaMA: A Unified LLaMA Interface for Vision Tasks

Large language models are built on top of a transformer-based architecture to process textual inputs. For example, the LLaMA stands out among many open-source implementations. Can the same transformer be used to process 2D images? In this paper, we answer this question by unveiling a LLaMA-like vision transformer in plain and pyramid forms, termed VisionLLaMA, which is tailored for this purpose. VisionLLaMA is a unified and generic modelling framework for solving most vision tasks. We extensively evaluate its effectiveness using typical pre-training paradigms in a good portion of downstream tasks of image perception and especially image generation. In many cases, VisionLLaMA have exhibited substantial gains over the previous state-of-the-art vision transformers. We believe that VisionLLaMA can serve as a strong new baseline model for vision generation and understanding. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/VisionLLaMA.

Elucidating the Exposure Bias in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities, but their 'exposure bias' problem, described as the input mismatch between training and sampling, lacks in-depth exploration. In this paper, we systematically investigate the exposure bias problem in diffusion models by first analytically modelling the sampling distribution, based on which we then attribute the prediction error at each sampling step as the root cause of the exposure bias issue. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions to this issue and propose an intuitive metric for it. Along with the elucidation of exposure bias, we propose a simple, yet effective, training-free method called Epsilon Scaling to alleviate the exposure bias. We show that Epsilon Scaling explicitly moves the sampling trajectory closer to the vector field learned in the training phase by scaling down the network output (Epsilon), mitigating the input mismatch between training and sampling. Experiments on various diffusion frameworks (ADM, DDPM/DDIM, EDM, LDM), unconditional and conditional settings, and deterministic vs. stochastic sampling verify the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/forever208/ADM-ES; https://github.com/forever208/EDM-ES

Rank-Aware Negative Training for Semi-Supervised Text Classification

Semi-supervised text classification-based paradigms (SSTC) typically employ the spirit of self-training. The key idea is to train a deep classifier on limited labeled texts and then iteratively predict the unlabeled texts as their pseudo-labels for further training. However, the performance is largely affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels, which may not be significant in real-world scenarios. This paper presents a Rank-aware Negative Training (RNT) framework to address SSTC in learning with noisy label manner. To alleviate the noisy information, we adapt a reasoning with uncertainty-based approach to rank the unlabeled texts based on the evidential support received from the labeled texts. Moreover, we propose the use of negative training to train RNT based on the concept that ``the input instance does not belong to the complementary label''. A complementary label is randomly selected from all labels except the label on-target. Intuitively, the probability of a true label serving as a complementary label is low and thus provides less noisy information during the training, resulting in better performance on the test data. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution on various text classification benchmark datasets. Our extensive experiments show that it consistently overcomes the state-of-the-art alternatives in most scenarios and achieves competitive performance in the others. The code of RNT is publicly available at:https://github.com/amurtadha/RNT.

Global Pointer: Novel Efficient Span-based Approach for Named Entity Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) task aims at identifying entities from a piece of text that belong to predefined semantic types such as person, location, organization, etc. The state-of-the-art solutions for flat entities NER commonly suffer from capturing the fine-grained semantic information in underlying texts. The existing span-based approaches overcome this limitation, but the computation time is still a concern. In this work, we propose a novel span-based NER framework, namely Global Pointer (GP), that leverages the relative positions through a multiplicative attention mechanism. The ultimate goal is to enable a global view that considers the beginning and the end positions to predict the entity. To this end, we design two modules to identify the head and the tail of a given entity to enable the inconsistency between the training and inference processes. Moreover, we introduce a novel classification loss function to address the imbalance label problem. In terms of parameters, we introduce a simple but effective approximate method to reduce the training parameters. We extensively evaluate GP on various benchmark datasets. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that GP can outperform the existing solution. Moreover, the experimental results show the efficacy of the introduced loss function compared to softmax and entropy alternatives.

ZLPR: A Novel Loss for Multi-label Classification

In the era of deep learning, loss functions determine the range of tasks available to models and algorithms. To support the application of deep learning in multi-label classification (MLC) tasks, we propose the ZLPR (zero-bounded log-sum-exp \& pairwise rank-based) loss in this paper. Compared to other rank-based losses for MLC, ZLPR can handel problems that the number of target labels is uncertain, which, in this point of view, makes it equally capable with the other two strategies often used in MLC, namely the binary relevance (BR) and the label powerset (LP). Additionally, ZLPR takes the corelation between labels into consideration, which makes it more comprehensive than the BR methods. In terms of computational complexity, ZLPR can compete with the BR methods because its prediction is also label-independent, which makes it take less time and memory than the LP methods. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ZLPR on multiple benchmark datasets and multiple evaluation metrics. Moreover, we propose the soft version and the corresponding KL-divergency calculation method of ZLPR, which makes it possible to apply some regularization tricks such as label smoothing to enhance the generalization of models.

BERT-ASC: Auxiliary-Sentence Construction for Implicit Aspect Learning in Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task aims to associate a piece of text with a set of aspects and meanwhile infer their respective sentimental polarities. Up to now, the state-of-the-art approaches are built upon fine-tuning of various pre-trained language models. They commonly aim to learn the aspect-specific representation in the corpus. Unfortunately, the aspect is often expressed implicitly through a set of representatives and thus renders implicit mapping process unattainable unless sufficient labeled examples. In this paper, we propose to jointly address aspect categorization and aspect-based sentiment subtasks in a unified framework. Specifically, we first introduce a simple but effective mechanism that collaborates the semantic and syntactic information to construct auxiliary-sentences for the implicit aspect. Then, we encourage BERT to learn the aspect-specific representation in response to the automatically constructed auxiliary-sentence instead of the aspect itself. Finally, we empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed solution by a comparative study on real benchmark datasets for both ABSA and Targeted-ABSA tasks. Our extensive experiments show that it consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of aspect categorization and aspect-based sentiment across all datasets and the improvement margins are considerable.

Sparse-softmax: A Simpler and Faster Alternative Softmax Transformation

The softmax function is widely used in artificial neural networks for the multiclass classification problems, where the softmax transformation enforces the output to be positive and sum to one, and the corresponding loss function allows to use maximum likelihood principle to optimize the model. However, softmax leaves a large margin for loss function to conduct optimizing operation when it comes to high-dimensional classification, which results in low-performance to some extent. In this paper, we provide an empirical study on a simple and concise softmax variant, namely sparse-softmax, to alleviate the problem that occurred in traditional softmax in terms of high-dimensional classification problems. We evaluate our approach in several interdisciplinary tasks, the experimental results show that sparse-softmax is simpler, faster, and produces better results than the baseline models.

ZARTS: On Zero-order Optimization for Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has been a popular one-shot paradigm for NAS due to its high efficiency. It introduces trainable architecture parameters to represent the importance of candidate operations and proposes first/second-order approximation to estimate their gradients, making it possible to solve NAS by gradient descent algorithm. However, our in-depth empirical results show that the approximation will often distort the loss landscape, leading to the biased objective to optimize and in turn inaccurate gradient estimation for architecture parameters. This work turns to zero-order optimization and proposes a novel NAS scheme, called ZARTS, to search without enforcing the above approximation. Specifically, three representative zero-order optimization methods are introduced: RS, MGS, and GLD, among which MGS performs best by balancing the accuracy and speed. Moreover, we explore the connections between RS/MGS and gradient descent algorithm and show that our ZARTS can be seen as a robust gradient-free counterpart to DARTS. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and search spaces show the remarkable performance of our method. In particular, results on 12 benchmarks verify the outstanding robustness of ZARTS, where the performance of DARTS collapses due to its known instability issue. Also, we search on the search space of DARTS to compare with peer methods, and our discovered architecture achieves 97.54% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 75.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which are state-of-the-art performance.