ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of their training context, or are they simply memorizing their training corpus at finer granularity and have learnt to better understand their context? To tease apart these possibilities, we introduce ALERT, a benchmark and suite of analyses for assessing language models' reasoning ability comparing pre-trained and finetuned models on complex tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. ALERT provides a test bed to asses any language model on fine-grained reasoning skills, which spans over 20 datasets and covers 10 different reasoning skills. We leverage ALERT to further investigate the role of finetuning. With extensive empirical analysis we find that language models learn more reasoning skills such as textual entailment, abductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning during finetuning stage compared to pretraining state. We also find that when language models are finetuned they tend to overfit to the prompt template, which hurts the robustness of models causing generalization problems.

STT: Soft Template Tuning for Few-Shot Adaptation

Prompt tuning has been an extremely effective tool to adapt a pre-trained model to downstream tasks. However, standard prompt-based methods mainly consider the case of sufficient data of downstream tasks. It is still unclear whether the advantage can be transferred to the few-shot regime, where only limited data are available for each downstream task. Although some works have demonstrated the potential of prompt-tuning under the few-shot setting, the main stream methods via searching discrete prompts or tuning soft prompts with limited data are still very challenging. Through extensive empirical studies, we find that there is still a gap between prompt tuning and fully fine-tuning for few-shot learning. To bridge the gap, we propose a new prompt-tuning framework, called Soft Template Tuning (STT). STT combines manual and auto prompts, and treats downstream classification tasks as a masked language modeling task. Comprehensive evaluation on different settings suggests STT can close the gap between fine-tuning and prompt-based methods without introducing additional parameters. Significantly, it can even outperform the time- and resource-consuming fine-tuning method on sentiment classification tasks.

Efficient Language Modeling with Sparse all-MLP

All-MLP architectures have attracted increasing interest as an alternative to attention-based models. In NLP, recent work like gMLP shows that all-MLPs can match Transformers in language modeling, but still lag behind in downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the limitations of MLPs in expressiveness, and propose sparsely activated MLPs with mixture-of-experts (MoEs) in both feature and input (token) dimensions. Such sparse all-MLPs significantly increase model capacity and expressiveness while keeping the compute constant. We address critical challenges in incorporating conditional computation with two routing strategies. The proposed sparse all-MLP improves language modeling perplexity and obtains up to 2$\times$ improvement in training efficiency compared to both Transformer-based MoEs (GShard, Switch Transformer, Base Layers and HASH Layers) as well as dense Transformers and all-MLPs. Finally, we evaluate its zero-shot in-context learning performance on six downstream tasks, and find that it surpasses Transformer-based MoEs and dense Transformers.

SDA: Improving Text Generation with Self Data Augmentation

Data augmentation has been widely used to improve deep neural networks in many research fields, such as computer vision. However, less work has been done in the context of text, partially due to its discrete nature and the complexity of natural languages. In this paper, we propose to improve the standard maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) paradigm by incorporating a self-imitation-learning phase for automatic data augmentation. Unlike most existing sentence-level augmentation strategies, which are only applied to specific models, our method is more general and could be easily adapted to any MLE-based training procedure. In addition, our framework allows task-specific evaluation metrics to be designed to flexibly control the generated sentences, for example, in terms of controlling vocabulary usage and avoiding nontrivial repetitions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method on two synthetic and several standard real datasets, significantly improving related baselines.

ReMP: Rectified Metric Propagation for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning features the capability of generalizing from a few examples. In this paper, we first identify that a discriminative feature space, namely a rectified metric space, that is learned to maintain the metric consistency from training to testing, is an essential component to the success of metric-based few-shot learning. Numerous analyses indicate that a simple modification of the objective can yield substantial performance gains. The resulting approach, called rectified metric propagation (ReMP), further optimizes an attentive prototype propagation network, and applies a repulsive force to make confident predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ReMP is effective and efficient, and outperforms the state of the arts on various standard few-shot learning datasets.

Structure-Aware Human-Action Generation

Generating long-range skeleton-based human actions has been a challenging problem since small deviations of one frame can cause a malformed action sequence. Most existing methods borrow ideas from video generation, which naively treat skeleton nodes/joints as pixels of images without considering the rich inter-frame and intra-frame structure information, leading to potential distorted actions. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) is a promising way to leverage structure information to learn structure representations. However, directly adopting GCNs to tackle such continuous action sequences both in spatial and temporal spaces is challenging as the action graph could be huge. To overcome this issue, we propose a variant of GCNs to leverage the powerful self-attention mechanism to adaptively sparsify a complete action graph in the temporal space. Our method could dynamically attend to important past frames and construct a sparse graph to apply in the GCN framework, well-capturing the structure information in action sequences. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method on two standard human action datasets compared with existing methods.

Discretized Bottleneck in VAE: Posterior-Collapse-Free Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are important tools in end-to-end representation learning. VAEs can capture complex data distributions and have been applied extensively in many natural-language-processing (NLP) tasks. However, a common pitfall in sequence-to-sequence learning with VAEs is the posterior-collapse issue in latent space, wherein the model tends to ignore latent variables when a strong auto-regressive decoder is implemented. In this paper, we propose a principled approach to eliminate this issue by applying a discretized bottleneck in the latent space. Specifically, we impose a shared discrete latent space where each input is learned to choose a combination of shared latent atoms as its latent representation. Compared with VAEs employing continuous latent variables, our model endows more promising capability in modeling underlying semantics of discrete sequences and can thus provide more interpretative latent structures. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our model on a broad range of tasks, including language modeling, unaligned text style transfer, dialog response generation, and neural machine translation.

Feature Quantization Improves GAN Training

The instability in GAN training has been a long-standing problem despite remarkable research efforts. We identify that instability issues stem from difficulties of performing feature matching with mini-batch statistics, due to a fragile balance between the fixed target distribution and the progressively generated distribution. In this work, we propose Feature Quantization (FQ) for the discriminator, to embed both true and fake data samples into a shared discrete space. The quantized values of FQ are constructed as an evolving dictionary, which is consistent with feature statistics of the recent distribution history. Hence, FQ implicitly enables robust feature matching in a compact space. Our method can be easily plugged into existing GAN models, with little computational overhead in training. We apply FQ to 3 representative GAN models on 9 benchmarks: BigGAN for image generation, StyleGAN for face synthesis, and U-GAT-IT for unsupervised image-to-image translation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed FQ-GAN can improve the FID scores of baseline methods by a large margin on a variety of tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.

Learning Diverse Stochastic Human-Action Generators by Learning Smooth Latent Transitions

Human-motion generation is a long-standing challenging task due to the requirement of accurately modeling complex and diverse dynamic patterns. Most existing methods adopt sequence models such as RNN to directly model transitions in the original action space. Due to high dimensionality and potential noise, such modeling of action transitions is particularly challenging. In this paper, we focus on skeleton-based action generation and propose to model smooth and diverse transitions on a latent space of action sequences with much lower dimensionality. Conditioned on a latent sequence, actions are generated by a frame-wise decoder shared by all latent action-poses. Specifically, an implicit RNN is defined to model smooth latent sequences, whose randomness (diversity) is controlled by noise from the input. Different from standard action-prediction methods, our model can generate action sequences from pure noise without any conditional action poses. Remarkably, it can also generate unseen actions from mixed classes during training. Our model is learned with a bi-directional generative-adversarial-net framework, which not only can generate diverse action sequences of a particular class or mix classes, but also learns to classify action sequences within the same model. Experimental results show the superiority of our method in both diverse action-sequence generation and classification, relative to existing methods.

Generating Adversarial Examples With Conditional Generative Adversarial Net

Recently, deep neural networks have significant progress and successful application in various fields, but they are found vulnerable to attack instances, e.g., adversarial examples. State-of-art attack methods can generate attack images by adding small perturbation to the source image. These attack images can fool the classifier but have little impact to human. Therefore, such attack instances are difficult to generate by searching the feature space. How to design an effective and robust generating method has become a spotlight. Inspired by adversarial examples, we propose two novel generative models to produce adaptive attack instances directly, in which conditional generative adversarial network is adopted and distinctive strategy is designed for training. Compared with the common method, such as Fast Gradient Sign Method, our models can reduce the generating cost and improve robustness and has about one fifth running time for producing attack instance.