Ming Zhong

Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Minhao Jiang et al.

Structured chemical reaction information plays a vital role for chemists engaged in laboratory work and advanced endeavors such as computer-aided drug design. Despite the importance of extracting structured reactions from scientific literature, data annotation for this purpose is cost-prohibitive due to the significant labor required from domain experts. Consequently, the scarcity of sufficient training data poses an obstacle to the progress of related models in this domain. In this paper, we propose ReactIE, which combines two weakly supervised approaches for pre-training. Our method utilizes frequent patterns within the text as linguistic cues to identify specific characteristics of chemical reactions. Additionally, we adopt synthetic data from patent records as distant supervision to incorporate domain knowledge into the model. Experiments demonstrate that ReactIE achieves substantial improvements and outperforms all existing baselines.

Siru Ouyang, Shuohang Wang, Minhao Jiang et al.

Speculative decoding stands as a pivotal technique to expedite inference in autoregressive (large) language models. This method employs a smaller draft model to speculate a block of tokens, which the target model then evaluates for acceptance. Despite a wealth of studies aimed at increasing the efficiency of speculative decoding, the influence of generation configurations on the decoding process remains poorly understood, especially concerning decoding temperatures. This paper delves into the effects of decoding temperatures on speculative decoding's efficacy. Beginning with knowledge distillation (KD), we first highlight the challenge of decoding at higher temperatures, and demonstrate KD in a consistent temperature setting could be a remedy. We also investigate the effects of out-of-domain testing sets with out-of-range temperatures. Building upon these findings, we take an initial step to further the speedup for speculative decoding, particularly in a high-temperature generation setting. Our work offers new insights into how generation configurations drastically affect the performance of speculative decoding, and underscores the need for developing methods that focus on diverse decoding configurations. Code is publically available at https://github.com/ozyyshr/TempSpec.

Ming Zhong, Zhizhi Wu, Nanako Honda

Dense retrievers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various information retrieval tasks, but their robustness against tokenizer poisoning remains underexplored. In this work, we assess the vulnerability of dense retrieval systems to poisoned tokenizers by evaluating models such as BERT, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR), Contriever, SimCSE, and ANCE. We find that supervised models like BERT and DPR experience significant performance degradation when tokenizers are compromised, while unsupervised models like ANCE show greater resilience. Our experiments reveal that even small perturbations can severely impact retrieval accuracy, highlighting the need for robust defenses in critical applications.