Language Model Detoxification in Dialogue with Contextualized Stance Control

To reduce the toxic degeneration in a pretrained Language Model (LM), previous work on Language Model detoxification has focused on reducing the toxicity of the generation itself (self-toxicity) without consideration of the context. As a result, a type of implicit offensive language where the generations support the offensive language in the context is ignored. Different from the LM controlling tasks in previous work, where the desired attributes are fixed for generation, the desired stance of the generation depends on the offensiveness of the context. Therefore, we propose a novel control method to do context-dependent detoxification with the stance taken into consideration. We introduce meta prefixes to learn the contextualized stance control strategy and to generate the stance control prefix according to the input context. The generated stance prefix is then combined with the toxicity control prefix to guide the response generation. Experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively learn the context-dependent stance control strategies while keeping a low self-toxicity of the underlying LM.

Explanations from Large Language Models Make Small Reasoners Better

Integrating free-text explanations to in-context learning of large language models (LLM) is shown to elicit strong reasoning capabilities along with reasonable explanations. In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging the explanations generated by LLM to improve the training of small reasoners, which are more favorable in real-production deployment due to their low cost. We systematically explore three explanation generation approaches from LLM and utilize a multi-task learning framework to facilitate small models to acquire strong reasoning power together with explanation generation capabilities. Experiments on multiple reasoning tasks show that our method can consistently and significantly outperform finetuning baselines across different settings, and even perform better than finetuning/prompting a 60x larger GPT-3 (175B) model by up to 9.5% in accuracy. As a side benefit, human evaluation further shows that our method can generate high-quality explanations to justify its predictions, moving towards the goal of explainable AI.

Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-Context Learning

Building dialogue systems requires a large corpus of annotated dialogues. Such datasets are usually created via crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel method for dialogue simulation based on language model in-context learning, dubbed as \textsc{Dialogic}. Seeded with a few annotated dialogues, \textsc{Dialogic} automatically selects in-context examples for demonstration and prompts GPT-3 to generate new dialogues and their annotations in a controllable way. Leveraging the strong in-context learning ability of GPT-3, our method can be used to rapidly expand a small set of dialogue data without requiring \textit{human involvement} or \textit{parameter update}, and is thus much more cost-efficient and time-saving than crowdsourcing. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ dataset demonstrate that training a model on the simulated dialogues leads to even better performance than using the same amount of human-generated dialogues in the low-resource settings, with as few as 85 dialogues as the seed data. Human evaluation results also show that our simulated dialogues has high language fluency and annotation accuracy. The code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/Leezekun/dialogic}{https://github.com/Leezekun/dialogic}.

How to Teach: Learning Data-Free Knowledge Distillation from Curriculum

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) aims at training lightweight student networks from teacher networks without training data. Existing approaches mainly follow the paradigm of generating informative samples and progressively updating student models by targeting data priors, boundary samples or memory samples. However, it is difficult for the previous DFKD methods to dynamically adjust the generation strategy at different training stages, which in turn makes it difficult to achieve efficient and stable training. In this paper, we explore how to teach students the model from a curriculum learning (CL) perspective and propose a new approach, namely "CuDFKD", i.e., "Data-Free Knowledge Distillation with Curriculum". It gradually learns from easy samples to difficult samples, which is similar to the way humans learn. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of the majorization minimization (MM) algorithm and explain the convergence of CuDFKD. Experiments conducted on benchmark datasets show that with a simple course design strategy, CuDFKD achieves the best performance over state-of-the-art DFKD methods and different benchmarks, such as 95.28\% top1 accuracy of the ResNet18 model on CIFAR10, which is better than training from scratch with data. The training is fast, reaching the highest accuracy of 90\% within 30 epochs, and the variance during training is stable. Also in this paper, the applicability of CuDFKD is also analyzed and discussed.

Limitations of Language Models in Arithmetic and Symbolic Induction

Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic manipulation, and commonsense reasoning with increasing size of models. However, it is still unclear what the underlying capabilities of these LMs are. Surprisingly, we find that these models have limitations on certain basic symbolic manipulation tasks such as copy, reverse, and addition. When the total number of symbols or repeating symbols increases, the model performance drops quickly. We investigate the potential causes behind this phenomenon and examine a set of possible methods, including explicit positional markers, fine-grained computation steps, and LMs with callable programs. Experimental results show that none of these techniques can solve the simplest addition induction problem completely. In the end, we introduce LMs with tutor, which demonstrates every single step of teaching. LMs with tutor is able to deliver 100% accuracy in situations of OOD and repeating symbols, shedding new insights on the boundary of large LMs in induction.

Visually-Augmented Language Modeling

Human language is grounded on multimodal knowledge including visual knowledge like colors, sizes, and shapes. However, current large-scale pre-trained language models rely on the text-only self-supervised training with massive text data, which precludes them from utilizing relevant visual information when necessary. To address this, we propose a novel pre-training framework, named VaLM, to Visually-augment text tokens with retrieved relevant images for Language Modeling. Specifically, VaLM builds on a novel text-vision alignment method via an image retrieval module to fetch corresponding images given a textual context. With the visually-augmented context, VaLM uses a visual knowledge fusion layer to enable multimodal grounded language modeling by attending on both text context and visual knowledge in images. We evaluate the proposed model on various multimodal commonsense reasoning tasks, which require visual information to excel. VaLM outperforms the text-only baseline with substantial gains of +8.66% and +37.81% accuracy on object color and size reasoning, respectively.

Task-adaptive Pre-training and Self-training are Complementary for Natural Language Understanding

Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) and Self-training (ST) have emerged as the major semi-supervised approaches to improve natural language understanding (NLU) tasks with massive amount of unlabeled data. However, it's unclear whether they learn similar representations or they can be effectively combined. In this paper, we show that TAPT and ST can be complementary with simple TFS protocol by following TAPT -> Finetuning -> Self-training (TFS) process. Experimental results show that TFS protocol can effectively utilize unlabeled data to achieve strong combined gains consistently across six datasets covering sentiment classification, paraphrase identification, natural language inference, named entity recognition and dialogue slot classification. We investigate various semi-supervised settings and consistently show that gains from TAPT and ST can be strongly additive by following TFS procedure. We hope that TFS could serve as an important semi-supervised baseline for future NLP studies.

Semi-Supervised Hypothesis Transfer for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Domain Adaptation has been widely used to deal with the distribution shift in vision, language, multimedia etc. Most domain adaptation methods learn domain-invariant features with data from both domains available. However, such a strategy might be infeasible in practice when source data are unavailable due to data-privacy concerns. To address this issue, we propose a novel adaptation method via hypothesis transfer without accessing source data at adaptation stage. In order to fully use the limited target data, a semi-supervised mutual enhancement method is proposed, in which entropy minimization and augmented label propagation are used iteratively to perform inter-domain and intra-domain alignments. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our method gets up to 19.9% improvements on semi-supervised adaptation tasks.

Lifelong Learning of Hate Speech Classification on Social Media

Existing work on automated hate speech classification assumes that the dataset is fixed and the classes are pre-defined. However, the amount of data in social media increases every day, and the hot topics changes rapidly, requiring the classifiers to be able to continuously adapt to new data without forgetting the previously learned knowledge. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is crucial for the real-word application of hate speech classifiers in social media. In this work, we propose lifelong learning of hate speech classification on social media. To alleviate catastrophic forgetting, we propose to use Variational Representation Learning (VRL) along with a memory module based on LB-SOINN (Load-Balancing Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network). Experimentally, we show that combining variational representation learning and the LB-SOINN memory module achieves better performance than the commonly-used lifelong learning techniques.

Inductive Relation Prediction by BERT

Relation prediction in knowledge graphs is dominated by embedding based methods which mainly focus on the transductive setting. Unfortunately, they are not able to handle inductive learning where unseen entities and relations are present and cannot take advantage of prior knowledge. Furthermore, their inference process is not easily explainable. In this work, we propose an all-in-one solution, called BERTRL (BERT-based Relational Learning), which leverages pre-trained language model and fine-tunes it by taking relation instances and their possible reasoning paths as training samples. BERTRL outperforms the SOTAs in 15 out of 18 cases in both inductive and transductive settings. Meanwhile, it demonstrates strong generalization capability in few-shot learning and is explainable.