DataCLUE: A Benchmark Suite for Data-centric NLP

Data-centric AI has recently proven to be more effective and high-performance, while traditional model-centric AI delivers fewer and fewer benefits. It emphasizes improving the quality of datasets to achieve better model performance. This field has significant potential because of its great practicability and getting more and more attention. However, we have not seen significant research progress in this field, especially in NLP. We propose DataCLUE, which is the first Data-Centric benchmark applied in NLP field. We also provide three simple but effective baselines to foster research in this field (improve Macro-F1 up to 5.7% point). In addition, we conduct comprehensive experiments with human annotators and show the hardness of DataCLUE. We also try an advanced method: the forgetting informed bootstrapping label correction method. All the resources related to DataCLUE, including datasets, toolkit, leaderboard, and baselines, is available online at https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/DataCLUE

Skeleton-Based Mutually Assisted Interacted Object Localization and Human Action Recognition

Skeleton data carries valuable motion information and is widely explored in human action recognition. However, not only the motion information but also the interaction with the environment provides discriminative cues to recognize the action of persons. In this paper, we propose a joint learning framework for mutually assisted "interacted object localization" and "human action recognition" based on skeleton data. The two tasks are serialized together and collaborate to promote each other, where preliminary action type derived from skeleton alone helps improve interacted object localization, which in turn provides valuable cues for the final human action recognition. Besides, we explore the temporal consistency of interacted object as constraint to better localize the interacted object with the absence of ground-truth labels. Extensive experiments on the datasets of SYSU-3D, NTU60 RGB+D and Northwestern-UCLA show that our method achieves the best or competitive performance with the state-of-the-art methods for human action recognition. Visualization results show that our method can also provide reasonable interacted object localization results.

Yuan 1.0: Large-Scale Pre-trained Language Model in Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning

Recent work like GPT-3 has demonstrated excellent performance of Zero-Shot and Few-Shot learning on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks by scaling up model size, dataset size and the amount of computation. However, training a model like GPT-3 requires huge amount of computational resources which makes it challengeable to researchers. In this work, we propose a method that incorporates large-scale distributed training performance into model architecture design. With this method, Yuan 1.0, the current largest singleton language model with 245B parameters, achieves excellent performance on thousands GPUs during training, and the state-of-the-art results on NLP tasks. A data processing method is designed to efficiently filter massive amount of raw data. The current largest high-quality Chinese corpus with 5TB high quality texts is built based on this method. In addition, a calibration and label expansion method is proposed to improve the Zero-Shot and Few-Shot performance, and steady improvement is observed on the accuracy of various tasks. Yuan 1.0 presents strong capacity of natural language generation, and the generated articles are difficult to distinguish from the human-written ones.

AdaK-NER: An Adaptive Top-K Approach for Named Entity Recognition with Incomplete Annotations

State-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition(NER) models rely heavily on large amountsof fully annotated training data. However, ac-cessible data are often incompletely annotatedsince the annotators usually lack comprehen-sive knowledge in the target domain. Normallythe unannotated tokens are regarded as non-entities by default, while we underline thatthese tokens could either be non-entities orpart of any entity. Here, we study NER mod-eling with incomplete annotated data whereonly a fraction of the named entities are la-beled, and the unlabeled tokens are equiva-lently multi-labeled by every possible label.Taking multi-labeled tokens into account, thenumerous possible paths can distract the train-ing model from the gold path (ground truthlabel sequence), and thus hinders the learn-ing ability. In this paper, we propose AdaK-NER, named the adaptive top-Kapproach, tohelp the model focus on a smaller feasible re-gion where the gold path is more likely to belocated. We demonstrate the superiority ofour approach through extensive experimentson both English and Chinese datasets, aver-agely improving 2% in F-score on the CoNLL-2003 and over 10% on two Chinese datasetscompared with the prior state-of-the-art works.

FewCLUE: A Chinese Few-shot Learning Evaluation Benchmark

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success in natural language understanding tasks. While different learning schemes -- fine-tuning, zero-shot and few-shot learning -- have been widely explored and compared for languages such as English, there is comparatively little work in Chinese to fairly and comprehensively evaluate and compare these methods. This work first introduces Chinese Few-shot Learning Evaluation Benchmark (FewCLUE), the first comprehensive small sample evaluation benchmark in Chinese. It includes nine tasks, ranging from single-sentence and sentence-pair classification tasks to machine reading comprehension tasks. Given the high variance of the few-shot learning performance, we provide multiple training/validation sets to facilitate a more accurate and stable evaluation of few-shot modeling. An unlabeled training set with up to 20,000 additional samples per task is provided, allowing researchers to explore better ways of using unlabeled samples. Next, we implement a set of state-of-the-art (SOTA) few-shot learning methods (including PET, ADAPET, LM-BFF, P-tuning and EFL), and compare their performance with fine-tuning and zero-shot learning schemes on the newly constructed FewCLUE benchmark.Our results show that: 1) all five few-shot learning methods exhibit better performance than fine-tuning or zero-shot learning; 2) among the five methods, PET is the best performing few-shot method; 3) few-shot learning performance is highly dependent on the specific task. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/FewCLUE

Evaluating Modules in Graph Contrastive Learning

The recent emergence of contrastive learning approaches facilitates the research on graph representation learning (GRL), introducing graph contrastive learning (GCL) into the literature. These methods contrast semantically similar and dissimilar sample pairs to encode the semantics into node or graph embeddings. However, most existing works only performed model-level evaluation, and did not explore the combination space of modules for more comprehensive and systematic studies. For effective module-level evaluation, we propose a framework that decomposes GCL models into four modules: (1) a sampler to generate anchor, positive and negative data samples (nodes or graphs); (2) an encoder and a readout function to get sample embeddings; (3) a discriminator to score each sample pair (anchor-positive and anchor-negative); and (4) an estimator to define the loss function. Based on this framework, we conduct controlled experiments over a wide range of architectural designs and hyperparameter settings on node and graph classification tasks. Specifically, we manage to quantify the impact of a single module, investigate the interaction between modules, and compare the overall performance with current model architectures. Our key findings include a set of module-level guidelines for GCL, e.g., simple samplers from LINE and DeepWalk are strong and robust; an MLP encoder associated with Sum readout could achieve competitive performance on graph classification. Finally, we release our implementations and results as OpenGCL, a modularized toolkit that allows convenient reproduction, standard model and module evaluation, and easy extension.

Hamiltonian Deep Neural Networks Guaranteeing Non-vanishing Gradients by Design

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training can be difficult due to vanishing and exploding gradients during weight optimization through backpropagation. To address this problem, we propose a general class of Hamiltonian DNNs (H-DNNs) that stem from the discretization of continuous-time Hamiltonian systems and include several existing architectures based on ordinary differential equations. Our main result is that a broad set of H-DNNs ensures non-vanishing gradients by design for an arbitrary network depth. This is obtained by proving that, using a semi-implicit Euler discretization scheme, the backward sensitivity matrices involved in gradient computations are symplectic. We also provide an upper bound to the magnitude of sensitivity matrices, and show that exploding gradients can be either controlled through regularization or avoided for special architectures. Finally, we enable distributed implementations of backward and forward propagation algorithms in H-DNNs by characterizing appropriate sparsity constraints on the weight matrices. The good performance of H-DNNs is demonstrated on benchmark classification problems, including image classification with the MNIST dataset.

A unified framework for Hamiltonian deep neural networks

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) can be difficult due to the occurrence of vanishing/exploding gradients during weight optimization. To avoid this problem, we propose a class of DNNs stemming from the time discretization of Hamiltonian systems. The time-invariant version of the corresponding Hamiltonian models enjoys marginal stability, a property that, as shown in previous works and for specific DNNs architectures, can mitigate convergence to zero or divergence of gradients. In the present paper, we formally study this feature by deriving and analysing the backward gradient dynamics in continuous time. The proposed Hamiltonian framework, besides encompassing existing networks inspired by marginally stable ODEs, allows one to derive new and more expressive architectures. The good performance of the novel DNNs is demonstrated on benchmark classification problems, including digit recognition using the MNIST dataset.

An Alignment-Agnostic Model for Chinese Text Error Correction

This paper investigates how to correct Chinese text errors with types of mistaken, missing and redundant characters, which is common for Chinese native speakers. Most existing models based on detect-correct framework can correct mistaken characters errors, but they cannot deal with missing or redundant characters. The reason is that lengths of sentences before and after correction are not the same, leading to the inconsistence between model inputs and outputs. Although the Seq2Seq-based or sequence tagging methods provide solutions to the problem and achieved relatively good results on English context, but they do not perform well in Chinese context according to our experimental results. In our work, we propose a novel detect-correct framework which is alignment-agnostic, meaning that it can handle both text aligned and non-aligned occasions, and it can also serve as a cold start model when there are no annotated data provided. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our method is effective and achieves the best performance among existing published models.

Transferable Interactiveness Knowledge for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is an important problem to understand how humans interact with objects. In this paper, we explore interactiveness knowledge which indicates whether a human and an object interact with each other or not. We found that interactiveness knowledge can be learned across HOI datasets and bridge the gap between diverse HOI category settings. Our core idea is to exploit an interactiveness network to learn the general interactiveness knowledge from multiple HOI datasets and perform Non-Interaction Suppression (NIS) before HOI classification in inference. On account of the generalization ability of interactiveness, interactiveness network is a transferable knowledge learner and can be cooperated with any HOI detection models to achieve desirable results. We utilize the human instance and body part features together to learn the interactiveness in hierarchical paradigm, i.e., instance-level and body part-level interactivenesses. Thereafter, a consistency task is proposed to guide the learning and extract deeper interactive visual clues. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on HICO-DET, V-COCO, and a newly constructed PaStaNet-HOI dataset. With the learned interactiveness, our method outperforms state-of-the-art HOI detection methods, verifying its efficacy and flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/Transferable-Interactiveness-Network.