While modern masked language models (LMs) are trained on ever larger corpora, we here explore the effects of down-scaling training to a modestly-sized but representative, well-balanced, and publicly available English text source -- the British National Corpus. We show that pre-training on this carefully curated corpus can reach better performance than the original BERT model. We argue that this type of corpora has great potential as a language modeling benchmark. To showcase this potential, we present fair, reproducible and data-efficient comparative studies of LMs, in which we evaluate several training objectives and model architectures and replicate previous empirical results in a systematic way. We propose an optimized LM architecture called LTG-BERT.
Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced Graph-to-Text (G2T) generation by processing the linearised version of a graph. However, the linearisation is known to ignore the structural information. Additionally, PLMs are typically pre-trained on free text which introduces domain mismatch between pre-training and downstream G2T generation tasks. To address these shortcomings, we propose graph masking pre-training strategies that neither require supervision signals nor adjust the architecture of the underlying pre-trained encoder-decoder model. When used with a pre-trained T5, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG+2020 and EventNarrative G2T generation datasets. Our method also shows to be very effective in the low-resource setting.
Pre-trained models have been used in many fields in recent years, ranging from natural language understanding to computer vision and natural language generation. However, the performance of these natural language generation models is overly dependent on the scale of the model and the size of the dataset. While the larger language model is excellent in some respects, it cannot learn up-to-date knowledge and is relatively difficult to relearn. In this paper, a new adversarial process learning method called Auto-Learning. This can improve the performance of any natural language generation model without the help of additional datasets. Auto-Learning includes two models: $G$ is a text generation model and $D$ can test whether the data generated by G is legitimate. Firstly, the fine-tuned $D$ model is used as the brain's knowledge base before the process. Then the text generated by the $G$ model is used as the input of $D$ to determine whether the text is legitimate or not. Finally, $G$ is fine-tuned according to the output of $D$. This adversarial process is like a self-escalation of the brain through some a priori knowledge. When this adversarial system wants to learn something new, simply fine-tune the $D$ model. Our approach applies to Autoregressive Language Modeling for all Transformer classes. The results are good in existing experimental tasks, including more grammatical text generation and better performance on some text comprehension tasks.
Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a new paradigm for generative models. Despite the success in domains using continuous signals such as vision and audio, adapting diffusion models to natural language is difficult due to the discrete nature of text. We tackle this challenge by proposing DiffuSeq: a diffusion model designed for sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) text generation tasks. Upon extensive evaluation over a wide range of Seq2Seq tasks, we find DiffuSeq achieving comparable or even better performance than six established baselines, including a state-of-the-art model that is based on pre-trained language models. Apart from quality, an intriguing property of DiffuSeq is its high diversity during generation, which is desired in many Seq2Seq tasks. We further include a theoretical analysis revealing the connection between DiffuSeq and autoregressive/non-autoregressive models. Bringing together theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, we demonstrate the great potential of diffusion models in complex conditional language generation tasks.
Video retrieval is becoming increasingly important owing to the rapid emergence of videos on the Internet. The dominant paradigm for video retrieval learns video-text representations by pushing the distance between the similarity of positive pairs and that of negative pairs apart from a fixed margin. However, negative pairs used for training are sampled randomly, which indicates that the semantics between negative pairs may be related or even equivalent, while most methods still enforce dissimilar representations to decrease their similarity. This phenomenon leads to inaccurate supervision and poor performance in learning video-text representations. While most video retrieval methods overlook that phenomenon, we propose an adaptive margin changed with the distance between positive and negative pairs to solve the aforementioned issue. First, we design the calculation framework of the adaptive margin, including the method of distance measurement and the function between the distance and the margin. Then, we explore a novel implementation called "Cross-Modal Generalized Self-Distillation" (CMGSD), which can be built on the top of most video retrieval models with few modifications. Notably, CMGSD adds few computational overheads at train time and adds no computational overhead at test time. Experimental results on three widely used datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can yield significantly better performance than the corresponding backbone model, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Multi-media communications facilitate global interaction among people. However, despite researchers exploring cross-lingual translation techniques such as machine translation and audio speech translation to overcome language barriers, there is still a shortage of cross-lingual studies on visual speech. This lack of research is mainly due to the absence of datasets containing visual speech and translated text pairs. In this paper, we present \textbf{AVMuST-TED}, the first dataset for \textbf{A}udio-\textbf{V}isual \textbf{Mu}ltilingual \textbf{S}peech \textbf{T}ranslation, derived from \textbf{TED} talks. Nonetheless, visual speech is not as distinguishable as audio speech, making it difficult to develop a mapping from source speech phonemes to the target language text. To address this issue, we propose MixSpeech, a cross-modality self-learning framework that utilizes audio speech to regularize the training of visual speech tasks. To further minimize the cross-modality gap and its impact on knowledge transfer, we suggest adopting mixed speech, which is created by interpolating audio and visual streams, along with a curriculum learning strategy to adjust the mixing ratio as needed. MixSpeech enhances speech translation in noisy environments, improving BLEU scores for four languages on AVMuST-TED by +1.4 to +4.2. Moreover, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in lip reading on CMLR (11.1\%), LRS2 (25.5\%), and LRS3 (28.0\%).
Making sense of familiar yet new situations typically involves making generalizations about causal schemas, stories that help humans reason about event sequences. Reasoning about events includes identifying cause and effect relations shared across event instances, a process we refer to as causal schema induction. Statistical schema induction systems may leverage structural knowledge encoded in discourse or the causal graphs associated with event meaning, however resources to study such causal structure are few in number and limited in size. In this work, we investigate how to apply schema induction models to the task of knowledge discovery for enhanced search of English-language news texts. To tackle the problem of data scarcity, we present Torquestra, a manually curated dataset of text-graph-schema units integrating temporal, event, and causal structures. We benchmark our dataset on three knowledge discovery tasks, building and evaluating models for each. Results show that systems that harness causal structure are effective at identifying texts sharing similar causal meaning components rather than relying on lexical cues alone. We make our dataset and models available for research purposes.
Large language models (LLMs) effectively generate fluent text when the target output follows natural language patterns. However, structured prediction tasks confine the output format to a limited ontology, causing even very large models to struggle since they were never trained with such restrictions in mind. The difficulty of using LLMs for direct prediction is exacerbated in few-shot learning scenarios, which commonly arise due to domain shift and resource limitations. We flip the problem on its head by leveraging the LLM as a tool for data augmentation rather than direct prediction. Our proposed Mixture of Soft Prompts (MSP) serves as a parameter-efficient procedure for generating data in a controlled manner. Denoising mechanisms are further applied to improve the quality of synthesized data. Automatic metrics show our method is capable of producing diverse and natural text, while preserving label semantics. Moreover, MSP achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks when compared against strong baselines. Our method offers an alternate data-centric approach for applying LLMs to complex prediction tasks.
We propose the $\textit{Quantization Model}$ of neural scaling laws, explaining both the observed power law dropoff of loss with model and data size, and also the sudden emergence of new capabilities with scale. We derive this model from what we call the $\textit{Quantization Hypothesis}$, where learned network capabilities are quantized into discrete chunks ($\textit{quanta}$). We show that when quanta are learned in order of decreasing use frequency, then a power law in use frequencies explains observed power law scaling of loss. We validate this prediction on toy datasets, then study how scaling curves decompose for large language models. Using language model internals, we auto-discover diverse model capabilities (quanta) and find tentative evidence that the distribution over corresponding subproblems in the prediction of natural text is compatible with the power law predicted from the neural scaling exponent as predicted from our theory.
The objective of this study is to address the critical issue of de-identification of clinical reports in order to allow access to data for research purposes, while ensuring patient privacy. The study highlights the difficulties faced in sharing tools and resources in this domain and presents the experience of the Greater Paris University Hospitals (AP-HP) in implementing a systematic pseudonymization of text documents from its Clinical Data Warehouse. We annotated a corpus of clinical documents according to 12 types of identifying entities, and built a hybrid system, merging the results of a deep learning model as well as manual rules. Our results show an overall performance of 0.99 of F1-score. We discuss implementation choices and present experiments to better understand the effort involved in such a task, including dataset size, document types, language models, or rule addition. We share guidelines and code under a 3-Clause BSD license.