Ryan Teehan

Erfan Al-Hossami, Razvan Bunescu, Justin Smith et al.

When employing the Socratic method of teaching, instructors guide students toward solving a problem on their own rather than providing the solution directly. While this strategy can substantially improve learning outcomes, it is usually time-consuming and cognitively demanding. Automated Socratic conversational agents can augment human instruction and provide the necessary scale, however their development is hampered by the lack of suitable data for training and evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a manually created dataset of multi-turn Socratic advice that is aimed at helping a novice programmer fix buggy solutions to simple computational problems. The dataset is then used for benchmarking the Socratic debugging abilities of a number of language models, ranging from fine-tuning the instruction-based text-to-text transformer Flan-T5 to zero-shot and chain of thought prompting of the much larger GPT-4. The code and datasets are made freely available for research at the link below. https://github.com/taisazero/socratic-debugging-benchmark

Victor Sanh, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel et al.

Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models' pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? To test this question at scale, we develop a system for easily mapping any natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts with diverse wording. These prompted datasets allow for benchmarking the ability of a model to perform completely held-out tasks. We fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model (Raffel et al., 2020; Lester et al., 2021) on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets, often outperforming models up to 16x its size. Further, our approach attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-bench benchmark, outperforming models up to 6x its size. All trained models are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/t-zero and all prompts are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

Ryan Teehan, Brenden Lake, Mengye Ren

Current language models are unable to quickly learn new concepts on the fly, often requiring a more involved finetuning process to learn robustly. Prompting in-context is not robust to context distractions, and often fails to confer much information about the new concepts. Classic methods for few-shot word learning in NLP, relying on global word vectors, are less applicable to large language models. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach named CoLLEGe (Concept Learning with Language Embedding Generation) to modernize few-shot concept learning. CoLLEGe is a meta-learning framework capable of generating flexible embeddings for new concepts using a small number of example sentences or definitions. Our primary meta-learning objective is simply to facilitate a language model to make next word predictions in forthcoming sentences, making it compatible with language model pretraining. We design a series of tasks to test new concept learning in challenging real-world scenarios, including new word acquisition, definition inference, and verbal reasoning, and demonstrate that our method succeeds in each setting without task-specific training. Code and data for our project can be found at https://college-concept-learning.github.io/

Shahbuland Matiana, JR Smith, Ryan Teehan et al.

Recent advances in large-scale language models (Raffel et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020) have brought significant qualitative and quantitative improvements in machine-driven text generation. Despite this, generation and evaluation of machine-generated narrative text remains a challenging problem. Objective evaluation of computationally-generated stories may be prohibitively expensive, require meticulously annotated datasets, or may not adequately measure the logical coherence of a generated story's narratological structure. Informed by recent advances in contrastive learning (Radford et al., 2021), we present Contrastive Authoring and Reviewing Pairing (CARP): a scalable, efficient method for performing qualitatively superior, zero-shot evaluation of stories. We show a strong correlation between human evaluation of stories and those of CARP. Model outputs more significantly correlate with corresponding human input than those language-model based methods which utilize finetuning or prompt engineering approaches. We also present and analyze the Story-Critique Dataset, a new corpora composed of 1.3 million aligned story-critique pairs derived from over 80,000 stories. We expect this corpus to be of interest to NLP researchers.