Yi Mao

Zhengbao Jiang, Yi Mao, Pengcheng He et al. · microsoft-research

The information in tables can be an important complement to text, making table-based question answering (QA) systems of great value. The intrinsic complexity of handling tables often adds an extra burden to both model design and data annotation. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple table-based QA model with minimal annotation effort. Motivated by the fact that table-based QA requires both alignment between questions and tables and the ability to perform complicated reasoning over multiple table elements, we propose an omnivorous pretraining approach that consumes both natural and synthetic data to endow models with these respective abilities. Specifically, given freely available tables, we leverage retrieval to pair them with relevant natural sentences for mask-based pretraining, and synthesize NL questions by converting SQL sampled from tables for pretraining with a QA loss. We perform extensive experiments in both few-shot and full settings, and the results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our model OmniTab, with the best multitasking approach achieving an absolute gain of 16.2% and 2.7% in 128-shot and full settings respectively, also establishing a new state-of-the-art on WikiTableQuestions. Detailed ablations and analyses reveal different characteristics of natural and synthetic data, shedding light on future directions in omnivorous pretraining. Code, pretraining data, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/OmniTab.

Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Song Wang et al. · microsoft-research

Dialog response generation in open domain is an important research topic where the main challenge is to generate relevant and diverse responses. In this paper, we propose a new dialog pre-training framework called DialogVED, which introduces continuous latent variables into the enhanced encoder-decoder pre-training framework to increase the relevance and diversity of responses. With the help of a large dialog corpus (Reddit), we pre-train the model using the following 4 tasks adopted in language models (LMs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs): 1) masked language model; 2) response generation; 3) bag-of-words prediction; and 4) KL divergence reduction. We also add additional parameters to model the turn structure in dialogs to improve the performance of the pre-trained model. We conduct experiments on PersonaChat, DailyDialog, and DSTC7-AVSD benchmarks for response generation. Experimental results show that our model achieves the new state-of-the-art results on all these datasets.

Shiyang Li, Jianshu Chen, Yelong Shen et al.

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.

Dong Li, Yelong Shen, Ruoming Jin et al.

Pre-trained language models have achieved promising success in code retrieval tasks, where a natural language documentation query is given to find the most relevant existing code snippet. However, existing models focus only on optimizing the documentation code pairs by embedding them into latent space, without the association of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose a generation-augmented query expansion framework. Inspired by the human retrieval process - sketching an answer before searching, in this work, we utilize the powerful code generation model to benefit the code retrieval task. Specifically, we demonstrate that rather than merely retrieving the target code snippet according to the documentation query, it would be helpful to augment the documentation query with its generation counterpart - generated code snippets from the code generation model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that leverages the code generation model to enhance the code retrieval task. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on the CodeSearchNet benchmark and surpass the baselines significantly.

Ziqing Wang, Zhirong Ye, Yuyang Du et al.

DBSCAN has been widely used in density-based clustering algorithms. However, with the increasing demand for Multi-density clustering, previous traditional DSBCAN can not have good clustering results on Multi-density datasets. In order to address this problem, an adaptive Multi-density DBSCAN algorithm (AMD-DBSCAN) is proposed in this paper. An improved parameter adaptation method is proposed in AMD-DBSCAN to search for multiple parameter pairs (i.e., Eps and MinPts), which are the key parameters to determine the clustering results and performance, therefore allowing the model to be applied to Multi-density datasets. Moreover, only one hyperparameter is required for AMD-DBSCAN to avoid the complicated repetitive initialization operations. Furthermore, the variance of the number of neighbors (VNN) is proposed to measure the difference in density between each cluster. The experimental results show that our AMD-DBSCAN reduces execution time by an average of 75% due to lower algorithm complexity compared with the traditional adaptive algorithm. In addition, AMD-DBSCAN improves accuracy by 24.7% on average over the state-of-the-art design on Multi-density datasets of extremely variable density, while having no performance loss in Single-density scenarios. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/AMD-DBSCAN.

Yu Li, Baolin Peng, Yelong Shen et al.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are challenging to build due to the lack of training data and heterogeneous knowledge sources. Existing systems perform poorly on unseen topics due to limited topics covered in the training data. In addition, heterogeneous knowledge sources make it challenging for systems to generalize to other tasks because knowledge sources in different knowledge representations require different knowledge encoders. To address these challenges, we present PLUG, a language model that homogenizes different knowledge sources to a unified knowledge representation for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation tasks. PLUG is pre-trained on a dialogue generation task conditioned on a unified essential knowledge representation. It can generalize to different downstream knowledge-grounded dialogue generation tasks with a few training examples. The empirical evaluation on two benchmarks shows that our model generalizes well across different knowledge-grounded tasks. It can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods under a fully-supervised setting and significantly outperforms other methods in zero-shot and few-shot settings.

Tao Shen, Yi Mao, Pengcheng He et al.

In this work, we aim at equipping pre-trained language models with structured knowledge. We present two self-supervised tasks learning over raw text with the guidance from knowledge graphs. Building upon entity-level masked language models, our first contribution is an entity masking scheme that exploits relational knowledge underlying the text. This is fulfilled by using a linked knowledge graph to select informative entities and then masking their mentions. In addition we use knowledge graphs to obtain distractors for the masked entities, and propose a novel distractor-suppressed ranking objective which is optimized jointly with masked language model. In contrast to existing paradigms, our approach uses knowledge graphs implicitly, only during pre-training, to inject language models with structured knowledge via learning from raw text. It is more efficient than retrieval-based methods that perform entity linking and integration during finetuning and inference, and generalizes more effectively than the methods that directly learn from concatenated graph triples. Experiments show that our proposed model achieves improved performance on five benchmark datasets, including question answering and knowledge base completion tasks.

Pengcheng He, Yi Mao, Kaushik Chakrabarti et al.

In this work, we present X-SQL, a new network architecture for the problem of parsing natural language to SQL query. X-SQL proposes to enhance the structural schema representation with the contextual output from BERT-style pre-training model, and together with type information to learn a new schema representation for down-stream tasks. We evaluated X-SQL on the WikiSQL dataset and show its new state-of-the-art performance.

Hao Liu, Yihao Feng, Yi Mao et al.

Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample efficiency during training. In this work, we propose a control variate method to effectively reduce variance for policy gradient methods. Motivated by the Stein's identity, our method extends the previous control variate methods used in REINFORCE and advantage actor-critic by introducing more general action-dependent baseline functions. Empirical studies show that our method significantly improves the sample efficiency of the state-of-the-art policy gradient approaches.

Joshua Dillon, Yi Mao, Guy Lebanon et al.

High dimensional structured data such as text and images is often poorly understood and misrepresented in statistical modeling. The standard histogram representation suffers from high variance and performs poorly in general. We explore novel connections between statistical translation, heat kernels on manifolds and graphs, and expected distances. These connections provide a new framework for unsupervised metric learning for text documents. Experiments indicate that the resulting distances are generally superior to their more standard counterparts.