Yordan Yordanov

Luca Pinchetti, Tommaso Salvatori, Yordan Yordanov et al. · oxford

A large amount of recent research has the far-reaching goal of finding training methods for deep neural networks that can serve as alternatives to backpropagation (BP). A prominent example is predictive coding (PC), which is a neuroscience-inspired method that performs inference on hierarchical Gaussian generative models. These methods, however, fail to keep up with modern neural networks, as they are unable to replicate the dynamics of complex layers and activation functions. In this work, we solve this problem by generalizing PC to arbitrary probability distributions, enabling the training of architectures, such as transformers, that are hard to approximate with only Gaussian assumptions. We perform three experimental analyses. First, we study the gap between our method and the standard formulation of PC on multiple toy examples. Second, we test the reconstruction quality on variational autoencoders, where our method reaches the same reconstruction quality as BP. Third, we show that our method allows us to train transformer networks and achieve a performance comparable with BP on conditional language models. More broadly, this method allows neuroscience-inspired learning to be applied to multiple domains, since the internal distributions can be flexibly adapted to the data, tasks, and architectures used.

Lei Sha, Yuhang Song, Yordan Yordanov et al. · oxford

Transformers have become an indispensable module for text generation models since their great success in machine translation. Previous works attribute the~success of transformers to the query-key-value dot-product attention, which provides a robust inductive bias by the fully connected token graphs. However, we found that self-attention has a severe limitation. When predicting the (i+1)-th token, self-attention only takes the i-th token as an information collector, and it tends to give a high attention weight to those tokens similar to itself. Therefore, most of the historical information that occurred before the i-th token is not taken into consideration. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a new architecture, called bird-eye transformer(BET), which goes one step further to improve the performance of transformers by reweighting self-attention to encourage it to focus more on important historical information. We have conducted experiments on multiple text generation tasks, including machine translation (2 datasets) and language models (3 datasets). These experimental~results show that our proposed model achieves a better performance than the baseline transformer architectures on~all~datasets. The code is released at: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/bet-transformer/home}.

Yordan Yordanov, Vid Kocijan, Thomas Lukasiewicz et al.

Training a model to provide natural language explanations (NLEs) for its predictions usually requires the acquisition of task-specific NLEs, which is time- and resource-consuming. A potential solution is the few-shot out-of-domain transfer of NLEs from a parent task with many NLEs to a child task. In this work, we examine the setup in which the child task has few NLEs but abundant labels. We establish four few-shot transfer learning methods that cover the possible fine-tuning combinations of the labels and NLEs for the parent and child tasks. We transfer explainability from a large natural language inference dataset (e-SNLI) separately to two child tasks: (1) hard cases of pronoun resolution, where we introduce the small-e-WinoGrande dataset of NLEs on top of the WinoGrande dataset, and (2)~commonsense validation (ComVE). Our results demonstrate that the parent task helps with NLE generation and we establish the best methods for this setup.

Yordan Yordanov, Oana-Maria Camburu, Vid Kocijan et al.

Hard cases of pronoun resolution have been used as a long-standing benchmark for commonsense reasoning. In the recent literature, pre-trained language models have been used to obtain state-of-the-art results on pronoun resolution. Overall, four categories of training and evaluation objectives have been introduced. The variety of training datasets and pre-trained language models used in these works makes it unclear whether the choice of training objective is critical. In this work, we make a fair comparison of the performance and seed-wise stability of four models that represent the four categories of objectives. Our experiments show that the objective of sequence ranking performs the best in-domain, while the objective of semantic similarity between candidates and pronoun performs the best out-of-domain. We also observe a seed-wise instability of the model using sequence ranking, which is not the case when the other objectives are used.