This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.
Cross-lingual summarization consists of generating a summary in one language given an input document in a different language, allowing for the dissemination of relevant content across speakers of other languages. However, this task remains challenging, mainly because of the need for cross-lingual datasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing and translating. This work presents $\mu$PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities that captures the conceptualization of the summary, i.e. identifying the salient content and expressing in which order to present the information, separate from the surface form. Using a multilingual knowledge base, we align the entities to their canonical designation across languages. $\mu$PLAN models first learn to generate the plan and then continue generating the summary conditioned on the plan and the input. We evaluate our methodology on the XWikis dataset on cross-lingual pairs across four languages and demonstrate that this planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of ROUGE and faithfulness scores. Moreover, this planning approach improves the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairs compared to non-planning baselines.
While conditional generation models can now generate natural language well enough to create fluent text, it is still difficult to control the generation process, leading to irrelevant, repetitive, and hallucinated content. Recent work shows that planning can be a useful intermediate step to render conditional generation less opaque and more grounded. We present a web browser-based demonstration for query-focused summarization that uses a sequence of question-answer pairs, as a blueprint plan for guiding text generation (i.e., what to say and in what order). We illustrate how users may interact with the generated text and associated plan visualizations, e.g., by editing and modifying the blueprint in order to improve or control the generated output. A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://goo.gle/text-blueprint-demo.
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well in answering questions and in producing long-form texts, both in few-shot closed-book settings. While the former can be validated using well-known evaluation metrics, the latter is difficult to evaluate. We resolve the difficulties to evaluate long-form output by doing both tasks at once -- to do question answering that requires long-form answers. Such questions tend to be multifaceted, i.e., they may have ambiguities and/or require information from multiple sources. To this end, we define query refinement prompts that encourage LLMs to explicitly express the multifacetedness in questions and generate long-form answers covering multiple facets of the question. Our experiments on two long-form question answering datasets, ASQA and AQuAMuSe, show that using our prompts allows us to outperform fully finetuned models in the closed book setting, as well as achieve results comparable to retrieve-then-generate open-book models.
Widely used evaluation metrics for text generation either do not work well with longer texts or fail to evaluate all aspects of text quality. In this paper, we introduce a new metric called SMART to mitigate such limitations. Specifically, We treat sentences as basic units of matching instead of tokens, and use a sentence matching function to soft-match candidate and reference sentences. Candidate sentences are also compared to sentences in the source documents to allow grounding (e.g., factuality) evaluation. Our results show that system-level correlations of our proposed metric with a model-based matching function outperforms all competing metrics on the SummEval summarization meta-evaluation dataset, while the same metric with a string-based matching function is competitive with current model-based metrics. The latter does not use any neural model, which is useful during model development phases where resources can be limited and fast evaluation is required. Finally, we also conducted extensive analyses showing that our proposed metrics work well with longer summaries and are less biased towards specific models.
The ability to convey relevant and faithful information is critical for many tasks in conditional generation and yet remains elusive for neural seq-to-seq models whose outputs often reveal hallucinations and fail to correctly cover important details. In this work, we advocate planning as a useful intermediate representation for rendering conditional generation less opaque and more grounded. Our work proposes a new conceptualization of text plans as a sequence of question-answer (QA) pairs. We enhance existing datasets (e.g., for summarization) with a QA blueprint operating as a proxy for both content selection (i.e.,~what to say) and planning (i.e.,~in what order). We obtain blueprints automatically by exploiting state-of-the-art question generation technology and convert input-output pairs into input-blueprint-output tuples. We develop Transformer-based models, each varying in how they incorporate the blueprint in the generated output (e.g., as a global plan or iteratively). Evaluation across metrics and datasets demonstrates that blueprint models are more factual than alternatives which do not resort to planning and allow tighter control of the generation output.
Commonsense reasoning systems should be able to generalize to diverse reasoning cases. However, most state-of-the-art approaches depend on expensive data annotations and overfit to a specific benchmark without learning how to perform general semantic reasoning. To overcome these drawbacks, zero-shot QA systems have shown promise as a robust learning scheme by transforming a commonsense knowledge graph (KG) into synthetic QA-form samples for model training. Considering the increasing type of different commonsense KGs, this paper aims to extend the zero-shot transfer learning scenario into multiple-source settings, where different KGs can be utilized synergetically. Towards this goal, we propose to mitigate the loss of knowledge from the interference among the different knowledge sources, by developing a modular variant of the knowledge aggregation as a new zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework. Results on five commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, improving the performance with multiple KGs.
Customer reviews are vital for making purchasing decisions in the Information Age. Such reviews can be automatically summarized to provide the user with an overview of opinions. In this tutorial, we present various aspects of opinion summarization that are useful for researchers and practitioners. First, we will introduce the task and major challenges. Then, we will present existing opinion summarization solutions, both pre-neural and neural. We will discuss how summarizers can be trained in the unsupervised, few-shot, and supervised regimes. Each regime has roots in different machine learning methods, such as auto-encoding, controllable text generation, and variational inference. Finally, we will discuss resources and evaluation methods and conclude with the future directions. This three-hour tutorial will provide a comprehensive overview over major advances in opinion summarization. The listeners will be well-equipped with the knowledge that is both useful for research and practical applications.
Metadata attributes (e.g., user and product IDs from reviews) can be incorporated as additional inputs to neural-based NLP models, by modifying the architecture of the models, in order to improve their performance. Recent models however rely on pretrained language models (PLMs), where previously used techniques for attribute injection are either nontrivial or ineffective. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and memory-efficient method to inject attributes to PLMs. We extend adapters, i.e. tiny plug-in feed-forward modules, to include attributes both independently of or jointly with the text. To limit the increase of parameters especially when the attribute vocabulary is large, we use low-rank approximations and hypercomplex multiplications, significantly decreasing the total parameters. We also introduce training mechanisms to handle domains in which attributes can be multi-labeled or sparse. Extensive experiments and analyses on eight datasets from different domains show that our method outperforms previous attribute injection methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets.