In Search of Needles in a 11M Haystack: Recurrent Memory Finds What LLMs Miss

This paper addresses the challenge of processing long documents using generative transformer models. To evaluate different approaches, we introduce BABILong, a new benchmark designed to assess model capabilities in extracting and processing distributed facts within extensive texts. Our evaluation, which includes benchmarks for GPT-4 and RAG, reveals that common methods are effective only for sequences up to $10^4$ elements. In contrast, fine-tuning GPT-2 with recurrent memory augmentations enables it to handle tasks involving up to $11\times 10^6$ elements. This achievement marks a substantial leap, as it is by far the longest input processed by any neural network model to date, demonstrating a significant improvement in the processing capabilities for long sequences.

In Search of Needles in a 10M Haystack: Recurrent Memory Finds What LLMs Miss

This paper addresses the challenge of processing long documents using generative transformer models. To evaluate different approaches, we introduce BABILong, a new benchmark designed to assess model capabilities in extracting and processing distributed facts within extensive texts. Our evaluation, which includes benchmarks for GPT-4 and RAG, reveals that common methods are effective only for sequences up to $10^4$ elements. In contrast, fine-tuning GPT-2 with recurrent memory augmentations enables it to handle tasks involving up to $10^7$ elements. This achievement marks a substantial leap, as it is by far the longest input processed by any open neural network model to date, demonstrating a significant improvement in the processing capabilities for long sequences.

Uncertainty Guided Global Memory Improves Multi-Hop Question Answering

Transformers have become the gold standard for many natural language processing tasks and, in particular, for multi-hop question answering (MHQA). This task includes processing a long document and reasoning over the multiple parts of it. The landscape of MHQA approaches can be classified into two primary categories. The first group focuses on extracting supporting evidence, thereby constraining the QA model's context to predicted facts. Conversely, the second group relies on the attention mechanism of the long input encoding model to facilitate multi-hop reasoning. However, attention-based token representations lack explicit global contextual information to connect reasoning steps. To address these issues, we propose GEMFormer, a two-stage method that first collects relevant information over the entire document to the memory and then combines it with local context to solve the task. Our experimental results show that fine-tuning a pre-trained model with memory-augmented input, including the most certain global elements, improves the model's performance on three MHQA datasets compared to the baseline. We also found that the global explicit memory contains information from supporting facts required for the correct answer.

Better Together: Enhancing Generative Knowledge Graph Completion with Language Models and Neighborhood Information

Real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incompleteness, which limits their potential performance. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) techniques aim to address this issue. However, traditional KGC methods are computationally intensive and impractical for large-scale KGs, necessitating the learning of dense node embeddings and computing pairwise distances. Generative transformer-based language models (e.g., T5 and recent KGT5) offer a promising solution as they can predict the tail nodes directly. In this study, we propose to include node neighborhoods as additional information to improve KGC methods based on language models. We examine the effects of this imputation and show that, on both inductive and transductive Wikidata subsets, our method outperforms KGT5 and conventional KGC approaches. We also provide an extensive analysis of the impact of neighborhood on model prediction and show its importance. Furthermore, we point the way to significantly improve KGC through more effective neighborhood selection.

Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer for Topic Classification

This article investigates the knowledge transfer from the RuQTopics dataset. This Russian topical dataset combines a large sample number (361,560 single-label, 170,930 multi-label) with extensive class coverage (76 classes). We have prepared this dataset from the "Yandex Que" raw data. By evaluating the RuQTopics - trained models on the six matching classes of the Russian MASSIVE subset, we have proved that the RuQTopics dataset is suitable for real-world conversational tasks, as the Russian-only models trained on this dataset consistently yield an accuracy around 85\% on this subset. We also have figured out that for the multilingual BERT, trained on the RuQTopics and evaluated on the same six classes of MASSIVE (for all MASSIVE languages), the language-wise accuracy closely correlates (Spearman correlation 0.773 with p-value 2.997e-11) with the approximate size of the pretraining BERT's data for the corresponding language. At the same time, the correlation of the language-wise accuracy with the linguistical distance from Russian is not statistically significant.

Active Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

Construction of human-curated annotated datasets for abstractive text summarization (ATS) is very time-consuming and expensive because creating each instance requires a human annotator to read a long document and compose a shorter summary that would preserve the key information relayed by the original document. Active Learning (AL) is a technique developed to reduce the amount of annotation required to achieve a certain level of machine learning model performance. In information extraction and text classification, AL can reduce the amount of labor up to multiple times. Despite its potential for aiding expensive annotation, as far as we know, there were no effective AL query strategies for ATS. This stems from the fact that many AL strategies rely on uncertainty estimation, while as we show in our work, uncertain instances are usually noisy, and selecting them can degrade the model performance compared to passive annotation. We address this problem by proposing the first effective query strategy for AL in ATS based on diversity principles. We show that given a certain annotation budget, using our strategy in AL annotation helps to improve the model performance in terms of ROUGE and consistency scores. Additionally, we analyze the effect of self-learning and show that it can further increase the performance of the model.

Collecting Interactive Multi-modal Datasets for Grounded Language Understanding

Human intelligence can remarkably adapt quickly to new tasks and environments. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided natural language instructions. To facilitate research which can enable similar capabilities in machines, we made the following contributions (1) formalized the collaborative embodied agent using natural language task; (2) developed a tool for extensive and scalable data collection; and (3) collected the first dataset for interactive grounded language understanding.

Learning to Solve Voxel Building Embodied Tasks from Pixels and Natural Language Instructions

The adoption of pre-trained language models to generate action plans for embodied agents is a promising research strategy. However, execution of instructions in real or simulated environments requires verification of the feasibility of actions as well as their relevance to the completion of a goal. We propose a new method that combines a language model and reinforcement learning for the task of building objects in a Minecraft-like environment according to the natural language instructions. Our method first generates a set of consistently achievable sub-goals from the instructions and then completes associated sub-tasks with a pre-trained RL policy. The proposed method formed the RL baseline at the IGLU 2022 competition.

Explain My Surprise: Learning Efficient Long-Term Memory by Predicting Uncertain Outcomes

In many sequential tasks, a model needs to remember relevant events from the distant past to make correct predictions. Unfortunately, a straightforward application of gradient based training requires intermediate computations to be stored for every element of a sequence. This requires prohibitively large computing memory if a sequence consists of thousands or even millions elements, and as a result, makes learning of very long-term dependencies infeasible. However, the majority of sequence elements can usually be predicted by taking into account only temporally local information. On the other hand, predictions affected by long-term dependencies are sparse and characterized by high uncertainty given only local information. We propose MemUP, a new training method that allows to learn long-term dependencies without backpropagating gradients through the whole sequence at a time. This method can be potentially applied to any gradient based sequence learning. MemUP implementation for recurrent architectures shows performances better or comparable to baselines while requiring significantly less computing memory.