WeLM: A Well-Read Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese

Large Language Models pre-trained with self-supervised learning have demonstrated impressive zero-shot generalization capabilities on a wide spectrum of tasks. In this work, we present WeLM: a well-read pre-trained language model for Chinese that is able to seamlessly perform different types of tasks with zero or few-shot demonstrations. WeLM is trained with 10B parameters by "reading" a curated high-quality corpus covering a wide range of topics. We show that WeLM is equipped with broad knowledge on various domains and languages. On 18 monolingual (Chinese) tasks, WeLM can significantly outperform existing pre-trained models with similar sizes and match the performance of models up to 25 times larger. WeLM also exhibits strong capabilities in multi-lingual and code-switching understanding, outperforming existing multilingual language models pre-trained on 30 languages. Furthermore, We collected human-written prompts for a large set of supervised datasets in Chinese and fine-tuned WeLM with multi-prompted training. The resulting model can attain strong generalization on unseen types of tasks and outperform the unsupervised WeLM in zero-shot learning. Finally, we demonstrate that WeLM has basic skills at explaining and calibrating the decisions from itself, which can be promising directions for future research. Our models can be applied from https://welm.weixin.qq.com/docs/api/.

Automatic Label Sequence Generation for Prompting Sequence-to-sequence Models

Prompting, which casts downstream applications as language modeling tasks, has shown to be sample efficient compared to standard fine-tuning with pre-trained models. However, one pitfall of prompting is the need of manually-designed patterns, whose outcome can be unintuitive and requires large validation sets to tune. To tackle the challenge, we propose AutoSeq, a fully automatic prompting method: (1) We adopt natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models, enabling free-form generation and larger label search space; (2) We propose label sequences -- phrases with indefinite lengths to verbalize the labels -- which eliminate the need of manual templates and are more expressive than single label words; (3) We use beam search to automatically generate a large amount of label sequence candidates and propose contrastive re-ranking to get the best combinations. AutoSeq significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods, such as soft prompt tuning, adapter tuning, and automatic search on single label words; the generated label sequences are even better than curated manual ones on a variety of tasks. Our method reveals the potential of sequence-to-sequence models in few-shot learning and sheds light on a path to generic and automatic prompting. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/Seq2Seq-Prompt.

Selecting Stickers in Open-Domain Dialogue through Multitask Learning

With the increasing popularity of online chatting, stickers are becoming important in our online communication. Selecting appropriate stickers in open-domain dialogue requires a comprehensive understanding of both dialogues and stickers, as well as the relationship between the two types of modalities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multitask learning method comprised of three auxiliary tasks to enhance the understanding of dialogue history, emotion and semantic meaning of stickers. Extensive experiments conducted on a recent challenging dataset show that our model can better combine the multimodal information and achieve significantly higher accuracy over strong baselines. Ablation study further verifies the effectiveness of each auxiliary task. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/nonstopfor/Sticker-Selection}

Rethink about the Word-level Quality Estimation for Machine Translation from Human Judgement

Word-level Quality Estimation (QE) of Machine Translation (MT) aims to find out potential translation errors in the translated sentence without reference. Typically, conventional works on word-level QE are designed to predict the translation quality in terms of the post-editing effort, where the word labels ("OK" and "BAD") are automatically generated by comparing words between MT sentences and the post-edited sentences through a Translation Error Rate (TER) toolkit. While the post-editing effort can be used to measure the translation quality to some extent, we find it usually conflicts with the human judgement on whether the word is well or poorly translated. To overcome the limitation, we first create a golden benchmark dataset, namely \emph{HJQE} (Human Judgement on Quality Estimation), where the expert translators directly annotate the poorly translated words on their judgements. Additionally, to further make use of the parallel corpus, we propose the self-supervised pre-training with two tag correcting strategies, namely tag refinement strategy and tree-based annotation strategy, to make the TER-based artificial QE corpus closer to \emph{HJQE}. We conduct substantial experiments based on the publicly available WMT En-De and En-Zh corpora. The results not only show our proposed dataset is more consistent with human judgment but also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed tag correcting strategies.\footnote{The data can be found at \url{https://github.com/ZhenYangIACAS/HJQE}.}

Scattering Model Guided Adversarial Examples for SAR Target Recognition: Attack and Defense

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) systems have shown to be highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that are deliberately designed yet almost imperceptible but can bias DNN inference when added to targeted objects. This leads to serious safety concerns when applying DNNs to high-stake SAR ATR applications. Therefore, enhancing the adversarial robustness of DNNs is essential for implementing DNNs to modern real-world SAR ATR systems. Toward building more robust DNN-based SAR ATR models, this article explores the domain knowledge of SAR imaging process and proposes a novel Scattering Model Guided Adversarial Attack (SMGAA) algorithm which can generate adversarial perturbations in the form of electromagnetic scattering response (called adversarial scatterers). The proposed SMGAA consists of two parts: 1) a parametric scattering model and corresponding imaging method and 2) a customized gradient-based optimization algorithm. First, we introduce the effective Attributed Scattering Center Model (ASCM) and a general imaging method to describe the scattering behavior of typical geometric structures in the SAR imaging process. By further devising several strategies to take the domain knowledge of SAR target images into account and relax the greedy search procedure, the proposed method does not need to be prudentially finetuned, but can efficiently to find the effective ASCM parameters to fool the SAR classifiers and facilitate the robust model training. Comprehensive evaluations on the MSTAR dataset show that the adversarial scatterers generated by SMGAA are more robust to perturbations and transformations in the SAR processing chain than the currently studied attacks, and are effective to construct a defensive model against the malicious scatterers.

A Multi-Format Transfer Learning Model for Event Argument Extraction via Variational Information Bottleneck

Event argument extraction (EAE) aims to extract arguments with given roles from texts, which have been widely studied in natural language processing. Most previous works have achieved good performance in specific EAE datasets with dedicated neural architectures. Whereas, these architectures are usually difficult to adapt to new datasets/scenarios with various annotation schemas or formats. Furthermore, they rely on large-scale labeled data for training, which is unavailable due to the high labelling cost in most cases. In this paper, we propose a multi-format transfer learning model with variational information bottleneck, which makes use of the information especially the common knowledge in existing datasets for EAE in new datasets. Specifically, we introduce a shared-specific prompt framework to learn both format-shared and format-specific knowledge from datasets with different formats. In order to further absorb the common knowledge for EAE and eliminate the irrelevant noise, we integrate variational information bottleneck into our architecture to refine the shared representation. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and obtain new state-of-the-art performance on EAE.

A Simple Baseline for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection

3D object detection with surrounding cameras has been a promising direction for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present SimMOD, a Simple baseline for Multi-camera Object Detection, to solve the problem. To incorporate multi-view information as well as build upon previous efforts on monocular 3D object detection, the framework is built on sample-wise object proposals and designed to work in a two-stage manner. First, we extract multi-scale features and generate the perspective object proposals on each monocular image. Second, the multi-view proposals are aggregated and then iteratively refined with multi-view and multi-scale visual features in the DETR3D-style. The refined proposals are end-to-end decoded into the detection results. To further boost the performance, we incorporate the auxiliary branches alongside the proposal generation to enhance the feature learning. Also, we design the methods of target filtering and teacher forcing to promote the consistency of two-stage training. We conduct extensive experiments on the 3D object detection benchmark of nuScenes to demonstrate the effectiveness of SimMOD and achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Code will be available at https://github.com/zhangyp15/SimMOD.

Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis

Despite having achieved great success for sentiment analysis, existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis. This may be due to the fact that they may latch onto spurious correlations ("shortcuts", e.g., focusing only on explicit sentiment words), resulting in undermining the effectiveness and robustness of the learned model. In this work, we propose a causal intervention model for Implicit Sentiment Analysis using Instrumental Variable (ISAIV). We first review sentiment analysis from a causal perspective and analyze the confounders existing in this task. Then, we introduce an instrumental variable to eliminate the confounding causal effects, thus extracting the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment. We compare the proposed ISAIV model with several strong baselines on both the general implicit sentiment analysis and aspect-based implicit sentiment analysis tasks. The results indicate the great advantages of our model and the efficacy of implicit sentiment reasoning.

Manual-Guided Dialogue for Flexible Conversational Agents

How to build and use dialogue data efficiently, and how to deploy models in different domains at scale can be two critical issues in building a task-oriented dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a novel manual-guided dialogue scheme to alleviate these problems, where the agent learns the tasks from both dialogue and manuals. The manual is an unstructured textual document that guides the agent in interacting with users and the database during the conversation. Our proposed scheme reduces the dependence of dialogue models on fine-grained domain ontology, and makes them more flexible to adapt to various domains. We then contribute a fully-annotated multi-domain dataset MagDial to support our scheme. It introduces three dialogue modeling subtasks: instruction matching, argument filling, and response generation. Modeling these subtasks is consistent with the human agent's behavior patterns. Experiments demonstrate that the manual-guided dialogue scheme improves data efficiency and domain scalability in building dialogue systems. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly available for promoting future research.

HorNet: Efficient High-Order Spatial Interactions with Recursive Gated Convolutions

Recent progress in vision Transformers exhibits great success in various tasks driven by the new spatial modeling mechanism based on dot-product self-attention. In this paper, we show that the key ingredients behind the vision Transformers, namely input-adaptive, long-range and high-order spatial interactions, can also be efficiently implemented with a convolution-based framework. We present the Recursive Gated Convolution ($\textit{g}^\textit{n}$Conv) that performs high-order spatial interactions with gated convolutions and recursive designs. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable, which is compatible with various variants of convolution and extends the two-order interactions in self-attention to arbitrary orders without introducing significant extra computation. $\textit{g}^\textit{n}$Conv can serve as a plug-and-play module to improve various vision Transformers and convolution-based models. Based on the operation, we construct a new family of generic vision backbones named HorNet. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection and ADE20K semantic segmentation show HorNet outperform Swin Transformers and ConvNeXt by a significant margin with similar overall architecture and training configurations. HorNet also shows favorable scalability to more training data and a larger model size. Apart from the effectiveness in visual encoders, we also show $\textit{g}^\textit{n}$Conv can be applied to task-specific decoders and consistently improve dense prediction performance with less computation. Our results demonstrate that $\textit{g}^\textit{n}$Conv can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively combines the merits of both vision Transformers and CNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/HorNet