Selective Annotation Makes Language Models Better Few-Shot LearnersHongjin Su, Jungo Kasai, Chen Henry Wu et al. · allen-ai, cmu
Many recent approaches to natural language tasks are built on the remarkable abilities of large language models. Large language models can perform in-context learning, where they learn a new task from a few task demonstrations, without any parameter updates. This work examines the implications of in-context learning for the creation of datasets for new natural language tasks. Departing from recent in-context learning methods, we formulate an annotation-efficient, two-step framework: selective annotation that chooses a pool of examples to annotate from unlabeled data in advance, followed by prompt retrieval that retrieves task examples from the annotated pool at test time. Based on this framework, we propose an unsupervised, graph-based selective annotation method, voke-k, to select diverse, representative examples to annotate. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets (covering classification, commonsense reasoning, dialogue, and text/code generation) demonstrate that our selective annotation method improves the task performance by a large margin. On average, vote-k achieves a 12.9%/11.4% relative gain under an annotation budget of 18/100, as compared to randomly selecting examples to annotate. Compared to state-of-the-art supervised finetuning approaches, it yields similar performance with 10-100x less annotation cost across 10 tasks. We further analyze the effectiveness of our framework in various scenarios: language models with varying sizes, alternative selective annotation methods, and cases where there is a test data domain shift. We hope that our studies will serve as a basis for data annotations as large language models are increasingly applied to new tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-selective-annotation.
Natural Language to Code Translation with ExecutionFreda Shi, Daniel Fried, Marjan Ghazvininejad et al. · cmu, uw
Generative models of code, pretrained on large corpora of programs, have shown great success in translating natural language to code (Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022, inter alia). While these models do not explicitly incorporate program semantics (i.e., execution results) during training, they are able to generate correct solutions for many problems. However, choosing a single correct program from a generated set for each problem remains challenging. In this work, we introduce execution result--based minimum Bayes risk decoding (MBR-EXEC) for program selection and show that it improves the few-shot performance of pretrained code models on natural-language-to-code tasks. We select output programs from a generated candidate set by marginalizing over program implementations that share the same semantics. Because exact equivalence is intractable, we execute each program on a small number of test inputs to approximate semantic equivalence. Across datasets, execution or simulated execution significantly outperforms the methods that do not involve program semantics. We find that MBR-EXEC consistently improves over all execution-unaware selection methods, suggesting it as an effective approach for natural language to code translation. We open-source our code at github.com/facebookresearch/mbr-exec and data at dl.fbaipublicfiles.com/mbr-exec/mbr-exec-release.zip
Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter MergingJoel Jang, Seungone Kim, Bill Yuchen Lin et al. · allen-ai, cmu
While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with general, aggregate human preferences, it is suboptimal for learning diverse, individual perspectives. In this work, we study Reinforcement Learning from Personalized Human Feedback (RLPHF) problem, wherein LLMs are aligned to multiple (sometimes conflicting) preferences by modeling alignment as a Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) problem. Compared to strong single-objective baselines, we show that we can achieve personalized alignment by decomposing preferences into multiple dimensions. These dimensions are defined based on personalizations that are declared as desirable by the user. In this work, we show that they can be efficiently trained independently in a distributed manner and combined effectively post-hoc through parameter merging. The code is available at https://github.com/joeljang/RLPHF.
LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at ScaleTim Dettmers, Mike Lewis, Younes Belkada et al. · uw
Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our method, a 175B parameter 16/32-bit checkpoint can be loaded, converted to Int8, and used immediately without performance degradation. This is made possible by understanding and working around properties of highly systematic emergent features in transformer language models that dominate attention and transformer predictive performance. To cope with these features, we develop a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(). We first use vector-wise quantization with separate normalization constants for each inner product in the matrix multiplication, to quantize most of the features. However, for the emergent outliers, we also include a new mixed-precision decomposition scheme, which isolates the outlier feature dimensions into a 16-bit matrix multiplication while still more than 99.9% of values are multiplied in 8-bit. Using LLM.int8(), we show empirically it is possible to perform inference in LLMs with up to 175B parameters without any performance degradation. This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software.
PERFECT: Prompt-free and Efficient Few-shot Learning with Language ModelsRabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Luke Zettlemoyer, James Henderson et al. · meta-ai, uw
Current methods for few-shot fine-tuning of pretrained masked language models (PLMs) require carefully engineered prompts and verbalizers for each new task to convert examples into a cloze-format that the PLM can score. In this work, we propose PERFECT, a simple and efficient method for few-shot fine-tuning of PLMs without relying on any such handcrafting, which is highly effective given as few as 32 data points. PERFECT makes two key design choices: First, we show that manually engineered task prompts can be replaced with task-specific adapters that enable sample-efficient fine-tuning and reduce memory and storage costs by roughly factors of 5 and 100, respectively. Second, instead of using handcrafted verbalizers, we learn new multi-token label embeddings during fine-tuning, which are not tied to the model vocabulary and which allow us to avoid complex auto-regressive decoding. These embeddings are not only learnable from limited data but also enable nearly 100x faster training and inference. Experiments on a wide range of few-shot NLP tasks demonstrate that PERFECT, while being simple and efficient, also outperforms existing state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/perfect.git.
Nonparametric Masked Language ModelingSewon Min, Weijia Shi, Mike Lewis et al. · meta-ai, uw
Existing language models (LMs) predict tokens with a softmax over a finite vocabulary, which can make it difficult to predict rare tokens or phrases. We introduce NPM, the first nonparametric masked language model that replaces this softmax with a nonparametric distribution over every phrase in a reference corpus. NPM fills in the [MASK] solely from retrieving a token from a text corpus. We show that NPM can be efficiently trained with a contrastive objective and an in-batch approximation to full corpus retrieval. Zero-shot evaluation on 16 tasks including classification, fact probing and question answering demonstrates that NPM outperforms significantly larger parametric models, either with or without a retrieve-and-generate approach. It is particularly better at dealing with rare patterns (word senses or facts) and predicting rare or nearly unseen words (e.g., non-Latin script). We release the model and code at github.com/facebookresearch/NPM.
Binding Language Models in Symbolic LanguagesZhoujun Cheng, Tianbao Xie, Peng Shi et al. · cambridge
Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .
Demystifying CLIP DataHu Xu, Saining Xie, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan et al. · meta-ai, mit
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is an approach that has advanced research and applications in computer vision, fueling modern recognition systems and generative models. We believe that the main ingredient to the success of CLIP is its data and not the model architecture or pre-training objective. However, CLIP only provides very limited information about its data and how it has been collected, leading to works that aim to reproduce CLIP's data by filtering with its model parameters. In this work, we intend to reveal CLIP's data curation approach and in our pursuit of making it open to the community introduce Metadata-Curated Language-Image Pre-training (MetaCLIP). MetaCLIP takes a raw data pool and metadata (derived from CLIP's concepts) and yields a balanced subset over the metadata distribution. Our experimental study rigorously isolates the model and training settings, concentrating solely on data. MetaCLIP applied to CommonCrawl with 400M image-text data pairs outperforms CLIP's data on multiple standard benchmarks. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, MetaCLIP achieves 70.8% accuracy, surpassing CLIP's 68.3% on ViT-B models. Scaling to 1B data, while maintaining the same training budget, attains 72.4%. Our observations hold across various model sizes, exemplified by ViT-H achieving 80.5%, without any bells-and-whistles. Curation code and training data distribution on metadata is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/MetaCLIP.
54.8CLFeb 9, 2023
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use ToolsTimo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì et al. · meta-ai, uw
Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce Toolformer, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. This is done in a self-supervised way, requiring nothing more than a handful of demonstrations for each API. We incorporate a range of tools, including a calculator, a Q\&A system, two different search engines, a translation system, and a calendar. Toolformer achieves substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks, often competitive with much larger models, without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.
OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language ModelsSusan Zhang, Stephen Roller, Naman Goyal et al. · meta-ai, uw
Large language models, which are often trained for hundreds of thousands of compute days, have shown remarkable capabilities for zero- and few-shot learning. Given their computational cost, these models are difficult to replicate without significant capital. For the few that are available through APIs, no access is granted to the full model weights, making them difficult to study. We present Open Pre-trained Transformers (OPT), a suite of decoder-only pre-trained transformers ranging from 125M to 175B parameters, which we aim to fully and responsibly share with interested researchers. We show that OPT-175B is comparable to GPT-3, while requiring only 1/7th the carbon footprint to develop. We are also releasing our logbook detailing the infrastructure challenges we faced, along with code for experimenting with all of the released models.
InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and SynthesisDaniel Fried, Armen Aghajanyan, Jessy Lin et al. · berkeley, cmu
Code is seldom written in a single left-to-right pass and is instead repeatedly edited and refined. We introduce InCoder, a unified generative model that can perform program synthesis (via left-to-right generation) as well as editing (via infilling). InCoder is trained to generate code files from a large corpus of permissively licensed code, where regions of code have been randomly masked and moved to the end of each file, allowing code infilling with bidirectional context. Our model is the first generative model that is able to directly perform zero-shot code infilling, which we evaluate on challenging tasks such as type inference, comment generation, and variable re-naming. We find that the ability to condition on bidirectional context substantially improves performance on these tasks, while still performing comparably on standard program synthesis benchmarks in comparison to left-to-right only models pretrained at similar scale. The InCoder models and code are publicly released. https://sites.google.com/view/incoder-code-models
Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as OptimizationXiang Lisa Li, Ari Holtzman, Daniel Fried et al. · cmu, microsoft-research
Given a language model (LM), maximum probability is a poor decoding objective for open-ended generation, because it produces short and repetitive text. On the other hand, sampling can often produce incoherent text that drifts from the original topics. We propose contrastive decoding (CD), a reliable decoding approach that optimizes a contrastive objective subject to a plausibility constraint. The contrastive objective returns the difference between the likelihood under a large LM (called the expert, e.g. OPT-13B) and a small LM (called the amateur, e.g. OPT-125M), and the constraint ensures that the outputs are plausible. CD is inspired by the fact that the failures of larger LMs (e.g., repetition, incoherence) are even more prevalent in smaller LMs, and that this difference signals which texts should be preferred. CD requires zero additional training, and produces higher quality text than decoding from the larger LM alone. It also works across model scales (OPT-13B and GPT2-1.5B) and significantly outperforms four strong decoding algorithms (e.g., nucleus, top-k) in automatic and human evaluations across wikipedia, news and story domains.
DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code GenerationYuhang Lai, Chengxi Li, Yiming Wang et al. · cmu, uw
We introduce DS-1000, a code generation benchmark with a thousand data science problems spanning seven Python libraries, such as NumPy and Pandas. Compared to prior works, DS-1000 incorporates three core features. First, our problems reflect diverse, realistic, and practical use cases since we collected them from StackOverflow. Second, our automatic evaluation is highly specific (reliable) -- across all Codex-002-predicted solutions that our evaluation accept, only 1.8% of them are incorrect; we achieve this with multi-criteria metrics, checking both functional correctness by running test cases and surface-form constraints by restricting API usages or keywords. Finally, we proactively defend against memorization by slightly modifying our problems to be different from the original StackOverflow source; consequently, models cannot answer them correctly by memorizing the solutions from pre-training. The current best public system (Codex-002) achieves 43.3% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://ds1000-code-gen.github.io.
Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What MattersBoshi Wang, Sewon Min, Xiang Deng et al. · deepmind, uw
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series of reasoning steps in the demonstrations. Despite its success, there is still little understanding of what makes CoT prompting effective and which aspects of the demonstrated reasoning steps contribute to its performance. In this paper, we show that CoT reasoning is possible even with invalid demonstrations - prompting with invalid reasoning steps can achieve over 80-90% of the performance obtained using CoT under various metrics, while still generating coherent lines of reasoning during inference. Further experiments show that other aspects of the rationales, such as being relevant to the query and correctly ordering the reasoning steps, are much more important for effective CoT reasoning. Overall, these findings both deepen our understanding of CoT prompting, and open up new questions regarding LLMs' capability to learn to reason in context.
22.1CLMay 22, 2022
Memorization Without Overfitting: Analyzing the Training Dynamics of Large Language ModelsKushal Tirumala, Aram H. Markosyan, Luke Zettlemoyer et al. · meta-ai, uw
Despite their wide adoption, the underlying training and memorization dynamics of very large language models is not well understood. We empirically study exact memorization in causal and masked language modeling, across model sizes and throughout the training process. We measure the effects of dataset size, learning rate, and model size on memorization, finding that larger language models memorize training data faster across all settings. Surprisingly, we show that larger models can memorize a larger portion of the data before over-fitting and tend to forget less throughout the training process. We also analyze the memorization dynamics of different parts of speech and find that models memorize nouns and numbers first; we hypothesize and provide empirical evidence that nouns and numbers act as a unique identifier for memorizing individual training examples. Together, these findings present another piece of the broader puzzle of trying to understand what actually improves as models get bigger.
26.8CLDec 5, 2022
In-context Examples Selection for Machine TranslationSweta Agrawal, Chunting Zhou, Mike Lewis et al. · cmu, uw
Large-scale generative models show an impressive ability to perform a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using in-context learning, where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. For Machine Translation (MT), these examples are typically randomly sampled from the development dataset with a similar distribution as the evaluation set. However, it is unclear how the choice of these in-context examples and their ordering impacts the output translation quality. In this work, we aim to understand the properties of good in-context examples for MT in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. We show that the translation quality and the domain of the in-context examples matter and that 1-shot noisy unrelated example can have a catastrophic impact on output quality. While concatenating multiple random examples reduces the effect of noise, a single good prompt optimized to maximize translation quality on the development dataset can elicit learned information from the pre-trained language model. Adding similar examples based on an n-gram overlap with the test source significantly and consistently improves the translation quality of the outputs, outperforming a strong kNN-MT baseline in 2 out of 4 out-of-domain datasets.
Mega: Moving Average Equipped Gated AttentionXuezhe Ma, Chunting Zhou, Xiang Kong et al. · cmu, uw
The design choices in the Transformer attention mechanism, including weak inductive bias and quadratic computational complexity, have limited its application for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we introduce Mega, a simple, theoretically grounded, single-head gated attention mechanism equipped with (exponential) moving average to incorporate inductive bias of position-aware local dependencies into the position-agnostic attention mechanism. We further propose a variant of Mega that offers linear time and space complexity yet yields only minimal quality loss, by efficiently splitting the whole sequence into multiple chunks with fixed length. Extensive experiments on a wide range of sequence modeling benchmarks, including the Long Range Arena, neural machine translation, auto-regressive language modeling, and image and speech classification, show that Mega achieves significant improvements over other sequence models, including variants of Transformers and recent state space models.
ROSCOE: A Suite of Metrics for Scoring Step-by-Step ReasoningOlga Golovneva, Moya Chen, Spencer Poff et al. · berkeley, meta-ai
Large language models show improved downstream task performance when prompted to generate step-by-step reasoning to justify their final answers. These reasoning steps greatly improve model interpretability and verification, but objectively studying their correctness (independent of the final answer) is difficult without reliable methods for automatic evaluation. We simply do not know how often the stated reasoning steps actually support the final end task predictions. In this work, we present ROSCOE, a suite of interpretable, unsupervised automatic scores that improve and extend previous text generation evaluation metrics. To evaluate ROSCOE against baseline metrics, we design a typology of reasoning errors and collect synthetic and human evaluation scores on commonly used reasoning datasets. In contrast with existing metrics, ROSCOE can measure semantic consistency, logicality, informativeness, fluency, and factuality - among other traits - by leveraging properties of step-by-step rationales. We empirically verify the strength of our metrics on five human annotated and six programmatically perturbed diagnostics datasets - covering a diverse set of tasks that require reasoning skills and show that ROSCOE can consistently outperform baseline metrics.
24.5CLMar 16, 2023
ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language modelsBhargavi Paranjape, Scott Lundberg, Sameer Singh et al. · microsoft-research, uw
Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning in few- and zero-shot settings by generating intermediate chain of thought (CoT) reasoning steps. Further, each reasoning step can rely on external tools to support computation beyond the core LLM capabilities (e.g. search/running code). Prior work on CoT prompting and tool use typically requires hand-crafting task-specific demonstrations and carefully scripted interleaving of model generations with tool use. We introduce Automatic Reasoning and Tool-use (ART), a framework that uses frozen LLMs to automatically generate intermediate reasoning steps as a program. Given a new task to solve, ART selects demonstrations of multi-step reasoning and tool use from a task library. At test time, ART seamlessly pauses generation whenever external tools are called, and integrates their output before resuming generation. ART achieves a substantial improvement over few-shot prompting and automatic CoT on unseen tasks in the BigBench and MMLU benchmarks, and matches performance of hand-crafted CoT prompts on a majority of these tasks. ART is also extensible, and makes it easy for humans to improve performance by correcting errors in task-specific programs or incorporating new tools, which we demonstrate by drastically improving performance on select tasks with minimal human intervention.
23.3CLAug 11, 2023
Self-Alignment with Instruction BacktranslationXian Li, Ping Yu, Chunting Zhou et al. · cmu, meta-ai
We present a scalable method to build a high quality instruction following language model by automatically labelling human-written text with corresponding instructions. Our approach, named instruction backtranslation, starts with a language model finetuned on a small amount of seed data, and a given web corpus. The seed model is used to construct training examples by generating instruction prompts for web documents (self-augmentation), and then selecting high quality examples from among these candidates (self-curation). This data is then used to finetune a stronger model. Finetuning LLaMa on two iterations of our approach yields a model that outperforms all other LLaMa-based models on the Alpaca leaderboard not relying on distillation data, demonstrating highly effective self-alignment.
40.5LGSep 5, 2023
Scaling Autoregressive Multi-Modal Models: Pretraining and Instruction TuningLili Yu, Bowen Shi, Ramakanth Pasunuru et al. · berkeley, meta-ai
We present CM3Leon (pronounced "Chameleon"), a retrieval-augmented, token-based, decoder-only multi-modal language model capable of generating and infilling both text and images. CM3Leon uses the CM3 multi-modal architecture but additionally shows the extreme benefits of scaling up and tuning on more diverse instruction-style data. It is the first multi-modal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multi-task supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. It is also a general-purpose model that can do both text-to-image and image-to-text generation, allowing us to introduce self-contained contrastive decoding methods that produce high-quality outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this recipe is highly effective for multi-modal models. CM3Leon achieves state-of-the-art performance in text-to-image generation with 5x less training compute than comparable methods (zero-shot MS-COCO FID of 4.88). After SFT, CM3Leon can also demonstrate unprecedented levels of controllability in tasks ranging from language-guided image editing to image-controlled generation and segmentation.
38.8CLJan 30, 2023
REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language ModelsWeijia Shi, Sewon Min, Michihiro Yasunaga et al. · uw
We introduce REPLUG, a retrieval-augmented language modeling framework that treats the language model (LM) as a black box and augments it with a tuneable retrieval model. Unlike prior retrieval-augmented LMs that train language models with special cross attention mechanisms to encode the retrieved text, REPLUG simply prepends retrieved documents to the input for the frozen black-box LM. This simple design can be easily applied to any existing retrieval and language models. Furthermore, we show that the LM can be used to supervise the retrieval model, which can then find documents that help the LM make better predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that REPLUG with the tuned retriever significantly improves the performance of GPT-3 (175B) on language modeling by 6.3%, as well as the performance of Codex on five-shot MMLU by 5.1%.
Shepherd: A Critic for Language Model GenerationTianlu Wang, Ping Yu, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan et al. · berkeley, meta-ai
As large language models improve, there is increasing interest in techniques that leverage these models' capabilities to refine their own outputs. In this work, we introduce Shepherd, a language model specifically tuned to critique responses and suggest refinements, extending beyond the capabilities of an untuned model to identify diverse errors and provide suggestions to remedy them. At the core of our approach is a high quality feedback dataset, which we curate from community feedback and human annotations. Even though Shepherd is small (7B parameters), its critiques are either equivalent or preferred to those from established models including ChatGPT. Using GPT-4 for evaluation, Shepherd reaches an average win-rate of 53-87% compared to competitive alternatives. In human evaluation, Shepherd strictly outperforms other models and on average closely ties with ChatGPT.
SILO Language Models: Isolating Legal Risk In a Nonparametric DatastoreSewon Min, Suchin Gururangan, Eric Wallace et al. · allen-ai, berkeley
The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.
Training Trajectories of Language Models Across ScalesMengzhou Xia, Mikel Artetxe, Chunting Zhou et al. · cmu, princeton
Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger language models demonstrate more desirable behaviors? In this paper, we analyze the intermediate training checkpoints of differently sized OPT models (Zhang et al.,2022)--from 125M to 175B parameters--on next-token prediction, sequence-level generation, and downstream tasks. We find that 1) at a given perplexity and independent of model sizes, a similar subset of training tokens see the most significant reduction in loss, with the rest stagnating or showing double-descent behavior; 2) early in training, all models learn to reduce the perplexity of grammatical sequences that contain hallucinations, with small models halting at this suboptimal distribution and larger ones eventually learning to assign these sequences lower probabilities; 3) perplexity is a strong predictor of in-context learning performance on 74 multiple-choice tasks from BIG-Bench, and this holds independent of the model size. Together, these results show that perplexity is more predictive of model behaviors than model size or training computation.
One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text EmbeddingsHongjin Su, Weijia Shi, Jungo Kasai et al. · allen-ai, uw
We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.
23.1CLDec 22, 2022
OPT-IML: Scaling Language Model Instruction Meta Learning through the Lens of GeneralizationSrinivasan Iyer, Xi Victoria Lin, Ramakanth Pasunuru et al. · berkeley, meta-ai
Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.
41.7LGDec 19, 2022
The case for 4-bit precision: k-bit Inference Scaling LawsTim Dettmers, Luke Zettlemoyer · uw
Quantization methods reduce the number of bits required to represent each parameter in a model, trading accuracy for smaller memory footprints and inference latencies. However, the final model size depends on both the number of parameters of the original model and the rate of compression. For example, a 30B 8-bit model and a 60B 4-bit model have the same number of bits but may have very different zero-shot accuracies. In this work, we study this trade-off by developing inference scaling laws of zero-shot performance in Large Language Models (LLMs) to determine the bit-precision and model size that maximizes zero-shot performance. We run more than 35,000 experiments with 16-bit inputs and k-bit parameters to examine which zero-shot quantization methods improve scaling for 3 to 8-bit precision at scales of 19M to 176B parameters across the LLM families BLOOM, OPT, NeoX/Pythia, and GPT-2. We find that it is challenging to improve the bit-level scaling trade-off, with the only improvements being the use of a small block size -- splitting the parameters into small independently quantized blocks -- and the quantization data type being used (e.g., Int vs Float). Overall, our findings show that {4-bit} precision is almost universally optimal for total model bits and zero-shot accuracy.
26.2CLDec 8, 2022
Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity EstimationHila Gonen, Srini Iyer, Terra Blevins et al. · allen-ai, uw
Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best prompts. In this work, we analyze the factors that contribute to this variance and establish a new empirical hypothesis: the performance of a prompt is coupled with the extent to which the model is familiar with the language it contains. Over a wide range of tasks, we show that the lower the perplexity of the prompt is, the better the prompt is able to perform the task. As a result, we devise a method for creating prompts: (1) automatically extend a small seed set of manually written prompts by paraphrasing using GPT3 and backtranslation and (2) choose the lowest perplexity prompts to get significant gains in performance.
STOP: A dataset for Spoken Task Oriented Semantic ParsingPaden Tomasello, Akshat Shrivastava, Daniel Lazar et al. · meta-ai, uw
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) predicts intent directly from audio using a single model. It promises to improve the performance of assistant systems by leveraging acoustic information lost in the intermediate textual representation and preventing cascading errors from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Further, having one unified model has efficiency advantages when deploying assistant systems on-device. However, the limited number of public audio datasets with semantic parse labels hinders the research progress in this area. In this paper, we release the Spoken Task-Oriented semantic Parsing (STOP) dataset, the largest and most complex SLU dataset to be publicly available. Additionally, we define low-resource splits to establish a benchmark for improving SLU when limited labeled data is available. Furthermore, in addition to the human-recorded audio, we are releasing a TTS-generated version to benchmark the performance for low-resource domain adaptation of end-to-end SLU systems. Initial experimentation show end-to-end SLU models performing slightly worse than their cascaded counterparts, which we hope encourages future work in this direction.
The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language VariantsLucas Bandarkar, Davis Liang, Benjamin Muller et al. · uw
We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.
Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question GenerationDevendra Singh Sachan, Mike Lewis, Mandar Joshi et al. · mila, uw
We propose a simple and effective re-ranking method for improving passage retrieval in open question answering. The re-ranker re-scores retrieved passages with a zero-shot question generation model, which uses a pre-trained language model to compute the probability of the input question conditioned on a retrieved passage. This approach can be applied on top of any retrieval method (e.g. neural or keyword-based), does not require any domain- or task-specific training (and therefore is expected to generalize better to data distribution shifts), and provides rich cross-attention between query and passage (i.e. it must explain every token in the question). When evaluated on a number of open-domain retrieval datasets, our re-ranker improves strong unsupervised retrieval models by 6%-18% absolute and strong supervised models by up to 12% in terms of top-20 passage retrieval accuracy. We also obtain new state-of-the-art results on full open-domain question answering by simply adding the new re-ranker to existing models with no further changes.
52.1AIAug 20, 2024
Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal ModelChunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Arun Babu et al. · cmu, meta-ai
We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models up to 7B parameters from scratch on a mixture of text and image data, establishing scaling laws with respect to a variety of uni- and cross-modal benchmarks. Our experiments show that Transfusion scales significantly better than quantizing images and training a language model over discrete image tokens. By introducing modality-specific encoding and decoding layers, we can further improve the performance of Transfusion models, and even compress each image to just 16 patches. We further demonstrate that scaling our Transfusion recipe to 7B parameters and 2T multi-modal tokens produces a model that can generate images and text on a par with similar scale diffusion models and language models, reaping the benefits of both worlds.
CiT: Curation in Training for Effective Vision-Language DataHu Xu, Saining Xie, Po-Yao Huang et al. · meta-ai, uw
Large vision-language models are generally applicable to many downstream tasks, but come at an exorbitant training cost that only large institutions can afford. This paper trades generality for efficiency and presents Curation in Training (CiT), a simple and efficient vision-text learning algorithm that couples a data objective into training. CiT automatically yields quality data to speed-up contrastive image-text training and alleviates the need for an offline data filtering pipeline, allowing broad data sources (including raw image-text pairs from the web). CiT contains two loops: an outer loop curating the training data and an inner loop consuming the curated training data. The text encoder connects the two loops. Given metadata for tasks of interest, e.g., class names, and a large pool of image-text pairs, CiT alternatively selects relevant training data from the pool by measuring the similarity of their text embeddings and embeddings of the metadata. In our experiments, we observe that CiT can speed up training by over an order of magnitude, especially if the raw data size is large.
Branch-Train-Merge: Embarrassingly Parallel Training of Expert Language ModelsMargaret Li, Suchin Gururangan, Tim Dettmers et al. · allen-ai, uw
We present Branch-Train-Merge (BTM), a communication-efficient algorithm for embarrassingly parallel training of large language models (LLMs). We show it is possible to independently train subparts of a new class of LLMs on different subsets of the data, eliminating the massive multi-node synchronization currently required to train LLMs. BTM learns a set of independent expert LMs (ELMs), each specialized to a different textual domain, such as scientific or legal text. These ELMs can be added and removed to update data coverage, ensembled to generalize to new domains, or averaged to collapse back to a single LM for efficient inference. New ELMs are learned by branching from (mixtures of) ELMs in the current set, further training the parameters on data for the new domain, and then merging the resulting model back into the set for future use. Experiments show that BTM improves in- and out-of-domain perplexities as compared to GPT-style Transformer LMs, when controlling for training cost. Through extensive analysis, we show that these results are robust to different ELM initialization schemes, but require expert domain specialization; LM ensembles with random data splits do not perform well. We also present a study of scaling BTM into a new corpus of 64 domains (192B whitespace-separated tokens in total); the resulting LM (22.4B total parameters) performs as well as a Transformer LM trained with 2.5 times more compute. These gains grow with the number of domains, suggesting more aggressive parallelism could be used to efficiently train larger models in future work.
M2D2: A Massively Multi-domain Language Modeling DatasetMachel Reid, Victor Zhong, Suchin Gururangan et al. · allen-ai, deepmind
We present M2D2, a fine-grained, massively multi-domain corpus for studying domain adaptation in language models (LMs). M2D2 consists of 8.5B tokens and spans 145 domains extracted from Wikipedia and Semantic Scholar. Using ontologies derived from Wikipedia and ArXiv categories, we organize the domains in each data source into 22 groups. This two-level hierarchy enables the study of relationships between domains and their effects on in- and out-of-domain performance after adaptation. We also present a number of insights into the nature of effective domain adaptation in LMs, as examples of the new types of studies M2D2 enables. To improve in-domain performance, we show the benefits of adapting the LM along a domain hierarchy; adapting to smaller amounts of fine-grained domain-specific data can lead to larger in-domain performance gains than larger amounts of weakly relevant data. We further demonstrate a trade-off between in-domain specialization and out-of-domain generalization within and across ontologies, as well as a strong correlation between out-of-domain performance and lexical overlap between domains.
34.2CVNov 22, 2022
Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language ModelingMichihiro Yasunaga, Armen Aghajanyan, Weijia Shi et al. · uw
Recent multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-image and image-to-text generation. However, these models store all learned knowledge (e.g., the appearance of the Eiffel Tower) in the model parameters, requiring increasingly larger models and training data to capture more knowledge. To integrate knowledge in a more scalable and modular way, we propose a retrieval-augmented multimodal model, which enables a base multimodal model (generator) to refer to relevant text and images fetched by a retriever from external memory (e.g., documents on the web). Specifically, for the retriever, we use a pretrained CLIP, and for the generator, we train a CM3 Transformer on the LAION dataset. Our resulting model, named Retrieval-Augmented CM3 (RA-CM3), is the first multimodal model that can retrieve and generate both text and images. We show that RA-CM3 significantly outperforms baseline multimodal models such as DALL-E and CM3 on both image and caption generation tasks (12 FID and 17 CIDEr improvements on MS-COCO), while requiring much less compute for training (<30% of DALL-E). Moreover, we show that RA-CM3 exhibits novel capabilities, such as faithful image generation and multimodal in-context learning (e.g., image generation from demonstrations).
22.2CLJan 10, 2023
Scaling Laws for Generative Mixed-Modal Language ModelsArmen Aghajanyan, Lili Yu, Alexis Conneau et al. · uw
Generative language models define distributions over sequences of tokens that can represent essentially any combination of data modalities (e.g., any permutation of image tokens from VQ-VAEs, speech tokens from HuBERT, BPE tokens for language or code, and so on). To better understand the scaling properties of such mixed-modal models, we conducted over 250 experiments using seven different modalities and model sizes ranging from 8 million to 30 billion, trained on 5-100 billion tokens. We report new mixed-modal scaling laws that unify the contributions of individual modalities and the interactions between them. Specifically, we explicitly model the optimal synergy and competition due to data and model size as an additive term to previous uni-modal scaling laws. We also find four empirical phenomena observed during the training, such as emergent coordinate-ascent style training that naturally alternates between modalities, guidelines for selecting critical hyper-parameters, and connections between mixed-modal competition and training stability. Finally, we test our scaling law by training a 30B speech-text model, which significantly outperforms the corresponding unimodal models. Overall, our research provides valuable insights into the design and training of mixed-modal generative models, an important new class of unified models that have unique distributional properties.
12.2CLApr 17, 2022
Language Contamination Helps Explain the Cross-lingual Capabilities of English Pretrained ModelsTerra Blevins, Luke Zettlemoyer · uw
English pretrained language models, which make up the backbone of many modern NLP systems, require huge amounts of unlabeled training data. These models are generally presented as being trained only on English text but have been found to transfer surprisingly well to other languages. We investigate this phenomenon and find that common English pretraining corpora actually contain significant amounts of non-English text: even when less than 1% of data is not English (well within the error rate of strong language classifiers), this leads to hundreds of millions of foreign language tokens in large-scale datasets. We then demonstrate that even these small percentages of non-English data facilitate cross-lingual transfer for models trained on them, with target language performance strongly correlated to the amount of in-language data seen during pretraining. In light of these findings, we argue that no model is truly monolingual when pretrained at scale, which should be considered when evaluating cross-lingual transfer.
Improving Policy Learning via Language Dynamics DistillationVictor Zhong, Jesse Mu, Luke Zettlemoyer et al. · stanford, uw
Recent work has shown that augmenting environments with language descriptions improves policy learning. However, for environments with complex language abstractions, learning how to ground language to observations is difficult due to sparse, delayed rewards. We propose Language Dynamics Distillation (LDD), which pretrains a model to predict environment dynamics given demonstrations with language descriptions, and then fine-tunes these language-aware pretrained representations via reinforcement learning (RL). In this way, the model is trained to both maximize expected reward and retain knowledge about how language relates to environment dynamics. On SILG, a benchmark of five tasks with language descriptions that evaluate distinct generalization challenges on unseen environments (NetHack, ALFWorld, RTFM, Messenger, and Touchdown), LDD outperforms tabula-rasa RL, VAE pretraining, and methods that learn from unlabeled demonstrations in inverse RL and reward shaping with pretrained experts. In our analyses, we show that language descriptions in demonstrations improve sample-efficiency and generalization across environments, and that dynamics modelling with expert demonstrations is more effective than with non-experts.
2.3CLJun 7, 2022
LegoNN: Building Modular Encoder-Decoder ModelsSiddharth Dalmia, Dmytro Okhonko, Mike Lewis et al. · cmu, meta-ai
State-of-the-art encoder-decoder models (e.g. for machine translation (MT) or automatic speech recognition (ASR)) are constructed and trained end-to-end as an atomic unit. No component of the model can be (re-)used without the others, making it impossible to share parts, e.g. a high resourced decoder, across tasks. We describe LegoNN, a procedure for building encoder-decoder architectures in a way so that its parts can be applied to other tasks without the need for any fine-tuning. To achieve this reusability, the interface between encoder and decoder modules is grounded to a sequence of marginal distributions over a pre-defined discrete vocabulary. We present two approaches for ingesting these marginals; one is differentiable, allowing the flow of gradients across the entire network, and the other is gradient-isolating. To enable the portability of decoder modules between MT tasks for different source languages and across other tasks like ASR, we introduce a modality agnostic encoder which consists of a length control mechanism to dynamically adapt encoders' output lengths in order to match the expected input length range of pre-trained decoders. We present several experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of LegoNN models: a trained language generation LegoNN decoder module from German-English (De-En) MT task can be reused without any fine-tuning for the Europarl English ASR and the Romanian-English (Ro-En) MT tasks, matching or beating the performance of baseline. After fine-tuning, LegoNN models improve the Ro-En MT task by 1.5 BLEU points and achieve 12.5% relative WER reduction on the Europarl ASR task. To show how the approach generalizes, we compose a LegoNN ASR model from three modules -- each has been learned within different end-to-end trained models on three different datasets -- achieving an overall WER reduction of 19.5%.
25.5CLJan 25, 2023
XLM-V: Overcoming the Vocabulary Bottleneck in Multilingual Masked Language ModelsDavis Liang, Hila Gonen, Yuning Mao et al. · uw
Large multilingual language models typically rely on a single vocabulary shared across 100+ languages. As these models have increased in parameter count and depth, vocabulary size has remained largely unchanged. This \textit{vocabulary bottleneck} limits the representational capabilities of multilingual models like XLM-R. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for scaling to very large multilingual vocabularies by de-emphasizing token sharing between languages with little lexical overlap and assigning vocabulary capacity to achieve sufficient coverage for each individual language. Tokenizations using our vocabulary are typically more semantically meaningful and shorter compared to XLM-R. Leveraging this improved vocabulary, we train XLM-V, a multilingual language model with a one million token vocabulary. XLM-V outperforms XLM-R on every task we tested on ranging from natural language inference (XNLI), question answering (MLQA, XQuAD, TyDiQA), to named entity recognition (WikiAnn). XLM-V is particularly effective on low-resource language tasks and outperforms XLM-R by 11.2% and 5.8% absolute on MasakhaNER and Americas NLI, respectively.
16.2CLFeb 15, 2023
Dictionary-based Phrase-level Prompting of Large Language Models for Machine TranslationMarjan Ghazvininejad, Hila Gonen, Luke Zettlemoyer · uw
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable machine translation (MT) abilities via prompting, even though they were not explicitly trained for this task. However, even given the incredible quantities of data they are trained on, LLMs can struggle to translate inputs with rare words, which are common in low resource or domain transfer scenarios. We show that LLM prompting can provide an effective solution for rare words as well, by using prior knowledge from bilingual dictionaries to provide control hints in the prompts. We propose a novel method, DiPMT, that provides a set of possible translations for a subset of the input words, thereby enabling fine-grained phrase-level prompted control of the LLM. Extensive experiments show that DiPMT outperforms the baseline both in low-resource MT, as well as for out-of-domain MT. We further provide a qualitative analysis of the benefits and limitations of this approach, including the overall level of controllability that is achieved.
Z-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Pseudo-DemonstrationsXinxi Lyu, Sewon Min, Iz Beltagy et al. · allen-ai, uw
Although large language models can be prompted for both zero- and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available. In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus. Concretely, pseudo-demonstrations are constructed by (1) finding the nearest neighbors to the test input from the corpus and pairing them with random task labels, and (2) applying a set of techniques to reduce the amount of direct copying the model does from the resulting demonstrations. Evaluation on nine classification datasets shows that Z-ICL outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a significant margin, and is on par with in-context learning with labeled training data in the few-shot setting. Overall, Z-ICL provides a significantly higher estimate of the zero-shot performance levels of a model, and supports future efforts to develop better pseudo-demonstrations that further improve zero-shot results.
31.5CLOct 25, 2023
Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language ModelsWeijia Shi, Anirudh Ajith, Mengzhou Xia et al. · princeton, uw
Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable information, and test data for widely reported reference benchmarks. However, we currently have no way to know which data of these types is included or in what proportions. In this paper, we study the pretraining data detection problem: given a piece of text and black-box access to an LLM without knowing the pretraining data, can we determine if the model was trained on the provided text? To facilitate this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark WIKIMIA that uses data created before and after model training to support gold truth detection. We also introduce a new detection method Min-K% Prob based on a simple hypothesis: an unseen example is likely to contain a few outlier words with low probabilities under the LLM, while a seen example is less likely to have words with such low probabilities. Min-K% Prob can be applied without any knowledge about the pretraining corpus or any additional training, departing from previous detection methods that require training a reference model on data that is similar to the pretraining data. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that Min-K% Prob achieves a 7.4% improvement on WIKIMIA over these previous methods. We apply Min-K% Prob to three real-world scenarios, copyrighted book detection, contaminated downstream example detection and privacy auditing of machine unlearning, and find it a consistently effective solution.
Stable and low-precision training for large-scale vision-language modelsMitchell Wortsman, Tim Dettmers, Luke Zettlemoyer et al. · uw
We introduce new methods for 1) accelerating and 2) stabilizing training for large language-vision models. 1) For acceleration, we introduce SwitchBack, a linear layer for int8 quantized training which provides a speed-up of 13-25% while matching the performance of bfloat16 training within 0.1 percentage points for the 1B parameter CLIP ViT-Huge -- the largest int8 training to date. Our main focus is int8 as GPU support for float8 is rare, though we also analyze float8 training through simulation. While SwitchBack proves effective for float8, we show that standard techniques are also successful if the network is trained and initialized so that large feature magnitudes are discouraged, which we accomplish via layer-scale initialized with zeros. 2) For stability, we analyze loss spikes and find they consistently occur 1-8 iterations after the squared gradients become under-estimated by their AdamW second moment estimator. As a result, we recommend an AdamW-Adafactor hybrid which avoids loss spikes when training a CLIP ViT-Huge model and outperforms gradient clipping at the scales we test.
CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False PresuppositionsXinyan Velocity Yu, Sewon Min, Luke Zettlemoyer et al. · uw
Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models can find presuppositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting whether a presupposition is factually correct. This is in large part due to difficulty in retrieving relevant evidence passages from a large text corpus. CREPE provides a benchmark to study question answering in the wild, and our analyses provide avenues for future work in better modeling and further studying the task.
Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage RetrieverDevendra Singh Sachan, Mike Lewis, Dani Yogatama et al. · mila, uw
We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where state-of-the-art methods typically require large supervised datasets with custom hard-negative mining and denoising of positive examples. ART, in contrast, only requires access to unpaired inputs and outputs (e.g. questions and potential answer documents). It uses a new document-retrieval autoencoding scheme, where (1) an input question is used to retrieve a set of evidence documents, and (2) the documents are then used to compute the probability of reconstructing the original question. Training for retrieval based on question reconstruction enables effective unsupervised learning of both document and question encoders, which can be later incorporated into complete Open QA systems without any further finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ART obtains state-of-the-art results on multiple QA retrieval benchmarks with only generic initialization from a pre-trained language model, removing the need for labeled data and task-specific losses.
Scaling Expert Language Models with Unsupervised Domain DiscoverySuchin Gururangan, Margaret Li, Mike Lewis et al. · allen-ai, uw
Large language models are typically trained densely: all parameters are updated with respect to all inputs. This requires synchronization of billions of parameters across thousands of GPUs. We introduce a simple but effective method to asynchronously train large, sparse language models on arbitrary text corpora. Our method clusters a corpus into sets of related documents, trains a separate expert language model on each cluster, and combines them in a sparse ensemble for inference. This approach generalizes embarrassingly parallel training by automatically discovering the domains for each expert, and eliminates nearly all the communication overhead of existing sparse language models. Our technique outperforms dense baselines on multiple corpora and few-shot tasks, and our analysis shows that specializing experts to meaningful clusters is key to these gains. Performance also improves with the number of experts and size of training data, suggesting this is a highly efficient and accessible approach to training large language models.
19.6CLDec 20, 2022
Toward Human Readable Prompt Tuning: Kubrick's The Shining is a good movie, and a good prompt too?Weijia Shi, Xiaochuang Han, Hila Gonen et al. · uw
Large language models can perform new tasks in a zero-shot fashion, given natural language prompts that specify the desired behavior. Such prompts are typically hand engineered, but can also be learned with gradient-based methods from labeled data. However, it is underexplored what factors make the prompts effective, especially when the prompts are natural language. In this paper, we investigate common attributes shared by effective prompts. We first propose a human readable prompt tuning method (F LUENT P ROMPT) based on Langevin dynamics that incorporates a fluency constraint to find a diverse distribution of effective and fluent prompts. Our analysis reveals that effective prompts are topically related to the task domain and calibrate the prior probability of label words. Based on these findings, we also propose a method for generating prompts using only unlabeled data, outperforming strong baselines by an average of 7.0% accuracy across three tasks.