Hua Wu

Xiaomin Fang, Fan Wang, Lihang Liu et al. · baidu

AI-based protein structure prediction pipelines, such as AlphaFold2, have achieved near-experimental accuracy. These advanced pipelines mainly rely on Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) as inputs to learn the co-evolution information from the homologous sequences. Nonetheless, searching MSAs from protein databases is time-consuming, usually taking dozens of minutes. Consequently, we attempt to explore the limits of fast protein structure prediction by using only primary sequences of proteins. HelixFold-Single is proposed to combine a large-scale protein language model with the superior geometric learning capability of AlphaFold2. Our proposed method, HelixFold-Single, first pre-trains a large-scale protein language model (PLM) with thousands of millions of primary sequences utilizing the self-supervised learning paradigm, which will be used as an alternative to MSAs for learning the co-evolution information. Then, by combining the pre-trained PLM and the essential components of AlphaFold2, we obtain an end-to-end differentiable model to predict the 3D coordinates of atoms from only the primary sequence. HelixFold-Single is validated in datasets CASP14 and CAMEO, achieving competitive accuracy with the MSA-based methods on the targets with large homologous families. Furthermore, HelixFold-Single consumes much less time than the mainstream pipelines for protein structure prediction, demonstrating its potential in tasks requiring many predictions. The code of HelixFold-Single is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleHelix/tree/dev/apps/protein_folding/helixfold-single, and we also provide stable web services on https://paddlehelix.baidu.com/app/drug/protein-single/forecast.

Shanzhuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Yan, Yueyang Huang et al.

Accurate ADMET (an abbreviation for "absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity") predictions can efficiently screen out undesirable drug candidates in the early stage of drug discovery. In recent years, multiple comprehensive ADMET systems that adopt advanced machine learning models have been developed, providing services to estimate multiple endpoints. However, those ADMET systems usually suffer from weak extrapolation ability. First, due to the lack of labelled data for each endpoint, typical machine learning models perform frail for the molecules with unobserved scaffolds. Second, most systems only provide fixed built-in endpoints and cannot be customised to satisfy various research requirements. To this end, we develop a robust and endpoint extensible ADMET system, HelixADMET (H-ADMET). H-ADMET incorporates the concept of self-supervised learning to produce a robust pre-trained model. The model is then fine-tuned with a multi-task and multi-stage framework to transfer knowledge between ADMET endpoints, auxiliary tasks, and self-supervised tasks. Our results demonstrate that H-ADMET achieves an overall improvement of 4%, compared with existing ADMET systems on comparable endpoints. Additionally, the pre-trained model provided by H-ADMET can be fine-tuned to generate new and customised ADMET endpoints, meeting various demands of drug research and development requirements.

Pengzhi Gao, Liwen Zhang, Zhongjun He et al.

Multilingual sentence representations are the foundation for similarity-based bitext mining, which is crucial for scaling multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system to more languages. In this paper, we introduce MuSR: a one-for-all Multilingual Sentence Representation model that supports more than 220 languages. Leveraging billions of English-centric parallel corpora, we train a multilingual Transformer encoder, coupled with an auxiliary Transformer decoder, by adopting a multilingual NMT framework with CrossConST, a cross-lingual consistency regularization technique proposed in Gao et al. (2023). Experimental results on multilingual similarity search and bitext mining tasks show the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, MuSR achieves superior performance over LASER3 (Heffernan et al., 2022) which consists of 148 independent multilingual sentence encoders.

Yanrui Du, Sendong Zhao, Yuhan Chen et al. · baidu

Pre-trained models have achieved success in Chinese Short Text Matching (STM) tasks, but they often rely on superficial clues, leading to a lack of robust predictions. To address this issue, it is crucial to analyze and mitigate the influence of superficial clues on STM models. Our study aims to investigate their over-reliance on the edit distance feature, commonly used to measure the semantic similarity of Chinese text pairs, which can be considered a superficial clue. To mitigate STM models' over-reliance on superficial clues, we propose a novel resampling training strategy called Gradually Learn Samples Containing Superficial Clue (GLS-CSC). Through comprehensive evaluations of In-Domain (I.D.), Robustness (Rob.), and Out-Of-Domain (O.O.D.) test sets, we demonstrate that GLS-CSC outperforms existing methods in terms of enhancing the robustness and generalization of Chinese STM models. Moreover, we conduct a detailed analysis of existing methods and reveal their commonality.

Guohao Li, Hu Yang, Feng He et al.

Video-and-language pre-training has shown promising results for learning generalizable representations. Most existing approaches usually model video and text in an implicit manner, without considering explicit structural representations of the multi-modal content. We denote such form of representations as structural knowledge, which express rich semantics of multiple granularities. There are related works that propose object-aware approaches to inject similar knowledge as inputs. However, the existing methods usually fail to effectively utilize such knowledge as regularizations to shape a superior cross-modal representation space. To this end, we propose a Cross-modaL knOwledge-enhanced Pre-training (CLOP) method with Knowledge Regularizations. There are two key designs of ours: 1) a simple yet effective Structural Knowledge Prediction (SKP) task to pull together the latent representations of similar videos; and 2) a novel Knowledge-guided sampling approach for Contrastive Learning (KCL) to push apart cross-modal hard negative samples. We evaluate our method on four text-video retrieval tasks and one multi-choice QA task. The experiments show clear improvements, outperforming prior works by a substantial margin. Besides, we provide ablations and insights of how our methods affect the latent representation space, demonstrating the value of incorporating knowledge regularizations into video-and-language pre-training.

Xiaoyue Wang, Lijie Wang, Xin Liu et al.

Current Transformer-based natural language understanding (NLU) models heavily rely on dataset biases, while failing to handle real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) instances. Many methods have been proposed to deal with this issue, but they ignore the fact that the features learned in different layers of Transformer-based NLU models are different. In this paper, we first conduct preliminary studies to obtain two conclusions: 1) both low- and high-layer sentence representations encode common biased features during training; 2) the low-layer sentence representations encode fewer unbiased features than the highlayer ones. Based on these conclusions, we propose a simple yet effective self-debiasing framework for Transformer-based NLU models. Concretely, we first stack a classifier on a selected low layer. Then, we introduce a residual connection that feeds the low-layer sentence representation to the top-layer classifier. In this way, the top-layer sentence representation will be trained to ignore the common biased features encoded by the low-layer sentence representation and focus on task-relevant unbiased features. During inference, we remove the residual connection and directly use the top-layer sentence representation to make predictions. Extensive experiments and indepth analyses on NLU tasks show that our framework performs better than several competitive baselines, achieving a new SOTA on all OOD test sets.

Yekun Chai, Qingyi Liu, Shuohuan Wang et al.

Amidst the rapid advancements in generative language models, the investigation of how training data shapes the performance of GPT models is still emerging. This paper presents GPTfluence, a novel approach that leverages a featurized simulation to assess the impact of training examples on the training dynamics of GPT models. Our approach not only traces the influence of individual training instances on performance trajectories, such as loss and other key metrics, on targeted test points but also enables a comprehensive comparison with existing methods across various training scenarios in GPT models, ranging from 14 million to 2.8 billion parameters, across a range of downstream tasks. Contrary to earlier methods that struggle with generalization to new data, GPTfluence introduces a parameterized simulation of training dynamics, demonstrating robust generalization capabilities to unseen training data. This adaptability is evident across both fine-tuning and instruction-tuning scenarios, spanning tasks in natural language understanding and generation. We make our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/ernie-research/gptfluence.

Xiaoyue Wang, Xin Liu, Lijie Wang et al.

As commonly-used methods for debiasing natural language understanding (NLU) models, dataset refinement approaches heavily rely on manual data analysis, and thus maybe unable to cover all the potential biased features. In this paper, we propose IBADR, an Iterative Bias-Aware Dataset Refinement framework, which debiases NLU models without predefining biased features. We maintain an iteratively expanded sample pool. Specifically, at each iteration, we first train a shallow model to quantify the bias degree of samples in the pool. Then, we pair each sample with a bias indicator representing its bias degree, and use these extended samples to train a sample generator. In this way, this generator can effectively learn the correspondence relationship between bias indicators and samples. Furthermore, we employ the generator to produce pseudo samples with fewer biased features by feeding specific bias indicators. Finally, we incorporate the generated pseudo samples into the pool. Experimental results and in-depth analyses on two NLU tasks show that IBADR not only significantly outperforms existing dataset refinement approaches, achieving SOTA, but also is compatible with model-centric methods.

Yekun Chai, Qingyi Liu, Jingwu Xiao et al.

The integration of visual and textual information represents a promising direction in the advancement of language models. In this paper, we explore the dual modality of language--both visual and textual--within an autoregressive framework, pre-trained on both document images and texts. Our method employs a multimodal training strategy, utilizing visual data through next patch prediction with a regression head and/or textual data through next token prediction with a classification head. We focus on understanding the interaction between these two modalities and their combined impact on model performance. Our extensive evaluation across a wide range of benchmarks shows that incorporating both visual and textual data significantly improves the performance of pixel-based language models. Remarkably, we find that a unidirectional pixel-based model trained solely on visual data can achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art bidirectional models on several language understanding tasks. This work uncovers the untapped potential of integrating visual and textual modalities for more effective language modeling. We release our code, data, and model checkpoints at \url{https://github.com/ernie-research/pixelgpt}.

Pengzhi Gao, Zhongjun He, Hua Wu et al.

The training paradigm for machine translation has gradually shifted, from learning neural machine translation (NMT) models with extensive parallel corpora to instruction finetuning on multilingual large language models (LLMs) with high-quality translation pairs. In this paper, we focus on boosting many-to-many multilingual translation of LLMs with an emphasis on zero-shot translation directions. We demonstrate that prompt strategies adopted during finetuning are crucial to zero-shot translation and introduce a cross-lingual consistency regularization, XConST, to bridge the representation gap among different languages and improve zero-shot translation performance. XConST is not a new method, but a version of CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023a) adapted for translation instruction finetuning with LLMs. Experimental results on ALMA (Xu et al., 2023), Tower (Team, 2024), and LLaMA-2 (Touvron et al., 2023) show that our approach consistently improves translation performance. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/gpengzhi/CrossConST-LLM.

Moye Chen, Wei Li, Jiachen Liu et al.

Most of existing extractive multi-document summarization (MDS) methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one to compose a summary, which have two main drawbacks: (1) neglecting both the intra and cross-document relations between sentences; (2) neglecting the coherence and conciseness of the whole summary. In this paper, we propose a novel MDS framework (SgSum) to formulate the MDS task as a sub-graph selection problem, in which source documents are regarded as a relation graph of sentences (e.g., similarity graph or discourse graph) and the candidate summaries are its sub-graphs. Instead of selecting salient sentences, SgSum selects a salient sub-graph from the relation graph as the summary. Comparing with traditional methods, our method has two main advantages: (1) the relations between sentences are captured by modeling both the graph structure of the whole document set and the candidate sub-graphs; (2) directly outputs an integrate summary in the form of sub-graph which is more informative and coherent. Extensive experiments on MultiNews and DUC datasets show that our proposed method brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. Human evaluation results also demonstrate that our model can produce significantly more coherent and informative summaries compared with traditional MDS methods. Moreover, the proposed architecture has strong transfer ability from single to multi-document input, which can reduce the resource bottleneck in MDS tasks. Our code and results are available at: \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/EMNLP2021-SgSum}.

Ruiyang Ren, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu et al.

In various natural language processing tasks, passage retrieval and passage re-ranking are two key procedures in finding and ranking relevant information. Since both the two procedures contribute to the final performance, it is important to jointly optimize them in order to achieve mutual improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel joint training approach for dense passage retrieval and passage re-ranking. A major contribution is that we introduce the dynamic listwise distillation, where we design a unified listwise training approach for both the retriever and the re-ranker. During the dynamic distillation, the retriever and the re-ranker can be adaptively improved according to each other's relevance information. We also propose a hybrid data augmentation strategy to construct diverse training instances for listwise training approach. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/RocketQA.

Quan Wang, Songtai Dai, Benfeng Xu et al.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT and GPT, have revolutionized the field of NLP, not only in the general domain but also in the biomedical domain. Most prior efforts in building biomedical PLMs have resorted simply to domain adaptation and focused mainly on English. In this work we introduce eHealth, a Chinese biomedical PLM built from scratch with a new pre-training framework. This new framework pre-trains eHealth as a discriminator through both token- and sequence-level discrimination. The former is to detect input tokens corrupted by a generator and recover their original identities from plausible candidates, while the latter is to further distinguish corruptions of a same original sequence from those of others. As such, eHealth can learn language semantics at both token and sequence levels. Extensive experiments on 11 Chinese biomedical language understanding tasks of various forms verify the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. We release the pre-trained model at \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/KG/eHealth} and will also release the code later.

Dongling Xiao, Yu-Kun Li, Han Zhang et al.

Coarse-grained linguistic information, such as named entities or phrases, facilitates adequately representation learning in pre-training. Previous works mainly focus on extending the objective of BERT's Masked Language Modeling (MLM) from masking individual tokens to contiguous sequences of n tokens. We argue that such contiguously masking method neglects to model the intra-dependencies and inter-relation of coarse-grained linguistic information. As an alternative, we propose ERNIE-Gram, an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance the integration of coarse-grained information into pre-training. In ERNIE-Gram, n-grams are masked and predicted directly using explicit n-gram identities rather than contiguous sequences of n tokens. Furthermore, ERNIE-Gram employs a generator model to sample plausible n-gram identities as optional n-gram masks and predict them in both coarse-grained and fine-grained manners to enable comprehensive n-gram prediction and relation modeling. We pre-train ERNIE-Gram on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tune on 19 downstream tasks. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Gram outperforms previous pre-training models like XLNet and RoBERTa by a large margin, and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

Hao Tian, Can Gao, Xinyan Xiao et al.

Recently, sentiment analysis has seen remarkable advance with the help of pre-training approaches. However, sentiment knowledge, such as sentiment words and aspect-sentiment pairs, is ignored in the process of pre-training, despite the fact that they are widely used in traditional sentiment analysis approaches. In this paper, we introduce Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training (SKEP) in order to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. With the help of automatically-mined knowledge, SKEP conducts sentiment masking and constructs three sentiment knowledge prediction objectives, so as to embed sentiment information at the word, polarity and aspect level into pre-trained sentiment representation. In particular, the prediction of aspect-sentiment pairs is converted into multi-label classification, aiming to capture the dependency between words in a pair. Experiments on three kinds of sentiment tasks show that SKEP significantly outperforms strong pre-training baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on most of the test datasets. We release our code at https://github.com/baidu/Senta.

Zeming Liu, Haifeng Wang, Zheng-Yu Niu et al.

We propose a new task of conversational recommendation over multi-type dialogs, where the bots can proactively and naturally lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog (e.g., QA) to a recommendation dialog, taking into account user's interests and feedback. To facilitate the study of this task, we create a human-to-human Chinese dialog dataset \emph{DuRecDial} (about 10k dialogs, 156k utterances), which contains multiple sequential dialogs for every pair of a recommendation seeker (user) and a recommender (bot). In each dialog, the recommender proactively leads a multi-type dialog to approach recommendation targets and then makes multiple recommendations with rich interaction behavior. This dataset allows us to systematically investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how to interact with users for recommendation. Finally we establish baseline results on DuRecDial for future studies. Dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/models/tree/develop/PaddleNLP/Research/ACL2020-DuRecDial.

Hongxuan Tang, Hongyu Li, Jing Liu et al.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a crucial task in natural language processing and has achieved remarkable advancements. However, most of the neural MRC models are still far from robust and fail to generalize well in real-world applications. In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we introduce a real-world Chinese dataset -- DuReader_robust. It is designed to evaluate the MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalization. Comparing to previous work, the instances in DuReader_robust are natural texts, rather than the altered unnatural texts. It presents the challenges when applying MRC models to real-world applications. The experimental results show that MRC models do not perform well on the challenge test set. Moreover, we analyze the behavior of existing models on the challenge test set, which may provide suggestions for future model development. The dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader.

Quan Wang, Pingping Huang, Haifeng Wang et al.

Knowledge graph embedding, which projects symbolic entities and relations into continuous vector spaces, is gaining increasing attention. Previous methods allow a single static embedding for each entity or relation, ignoring their intrinsic contextual nature, i.e., entities and relations may appear in different graph contexts, and accordingly, exhibit different properties. This work presents Contextualized Knowledge Graph Embedding (CoKE), a novel paradigm that takes into account such contextual nature, and learns dynamic, flexible, and fully contextualized entity and relation embeddings. Two types of graph contexts are studied: edges and paths, both formulated as sequences of entities and relations. CoKE takes a sequence as input and uses a Transformer encoder to obtain contextualized representations. These representations are hence naturally adaptive to the input, capturing contextual meanings of entities and relations therein. Evaluation on a wide variety of public benchmarks verifies the superiority of CoKE in link prediction and path query answering. It performs consistently better than, or at least equally well as current state-of-the-art in almost every case, in particular offering an absolute improvement of 21.0% in H@10 on path query answering. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/KG/CoKE}.

Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Yukun Li et al.

Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

Hao Xiong, Zhongjun He, Xiaoguang Hu et al.

Attention-based Encoder-Decoder has the effective architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), which typically relies on recurrent neural networks (RNN) to build the blocks that will be lately called by attentive reader during the decoding process. This design of encoder yields relatively uniform composition on source sentence, despite the gating mechanism employed in encoding RNN. On the other hand, we often hope the decoder to take pieces of source sentence at varying levels suiting its own linguistic structure: for example, we may want to take the entity name in its raw form while taking an idiom as a perfectly composed unit. Motivated by this demand, we propose Multi-channel Encoder (MCE), which enhances encoding components with different levels of composition. More specifically, in addition to the hidden state of encoding RNN, MCE takes 1) the original word embedding for raw encoding with no composition, and 2) a particular design of external memory in Neural Turing Machine (NTM) for more complex composition, while all three encoding strategies are properly blended during decoding. Empirical study on Chinese-English translation shows that our model can improve by 6.52 BLEU points upon a strong open source NMT system: DL4MT1. On the WMT14 English- French task, our single shallow system achieves BLEU=38.8, comparable with the state-of-the-art deep models.

Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints, particularly in processing critical tokens that demand complex reasoning. Empirical analysis reveals challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient spikes across layers, exposing architectural stress points in standard Transformers. Building on this insight, we propose Inner Thinking Transformer (ITT), which reimagines layer computations as implicit thinking steps. ITT dynamically allocates computation through Adaptive Token Routing, iteratively refines representations via Residual Thinking Connections, and distinguishes reasoning phases using Thinking Step Encoding. ITT enables deeper processing of critical tokens without parameter expansion. Evaluations across 162M-466M parameter models show ITT achieves 96.5\% performance of a 466M Transformer using only 162M parameters, reduces training data by 43.2\%, and outperforms Transformer/Loop variants in 11 benchmarks. By enabling elastic computation allocation during inference, ITT balances performance and efficiency through architecture-aware optimization of implicit thinking pathways.

Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhengyu Zhang et al.

Transformer models encounter challenges in scaling hidden dimensions efficiently, as uniformly increasing them inflates computational and memory costs while failing to emphasize the most relevant features for each token. For further understanding, we study hidden dimension sparsity and observe that trained Transformers utilize only a small fraction of token dimensions, revealing an "activation flow" pattern. Notably, there are shared sub-dimensions with sustained activation across multiple consecutive tokens and specialized sub-dimensions uniquely activated for each token. To better model token-relevant sub-dimensions, we propose MoHD (Mixture of Hidden Dimensions), a sparse conditional activation architecture. Particularly, MoHD employs shared sub-dimensions for common token features and a routing mechanism to dynamically activate specialized sub-dimensions. To mitigate potential information loss from sparsity, we design activation scaling and group fusion mechanisms to preserve activation flow. In this way, MoHD expands hidden dimensions with negligible increases in computation or parameters, efficient training and inference while maintaining performance. Evaluations across 10 NLP tasks show that MoHD surpasses Vanilla Transformers in parameter efficiency and task performance. It achieves 1.7% higher performance with 50% fewer activation parameters and 3.7% higher performance with a 3x parameter expansion at constant activation cost. MOHD offers a new perspective for scaling the model, showcasing the potential of hidden dimension sparsity to boost efficiency

Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin et al.

Named entity recognition in real-world applications suffers from the diversity of entity types, the emergence of new entity types, and the lack of high-quality annotations. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an in-context learning-based NER approach, which can effectively inject in-context NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. Specifically, we model PLMs as a meta-function $\mathcal{ λ_ {\text{instruction, demonstrations, text}}. M}$, and a new entity extractor can be implicitly constructed by applying new instruction and demonstrations to PLMs, i.e., $\mathcal{ (λ. M) }$(instruction, demonstrations) $\to$ $\mathcal{F}$ where $\mathcal{F}$ will be a new entity extractor, i.e., $\mathcal{F}$: text $\to$ entities. To inject the above in-context NER ability into PLMs, we propose a meta-function pre-training algorithm, which pre-trains PLMs by comparing the (instruction, demonstration)-initialized extractor with a surrogate golden extractor. Experimental results on 4 few-shot NER datasets show that our method can effectively inject in-context NER ability into PLMs and significantly outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts.

Pengzhi Gao, Liwen Zhang, Zhongjun He et al.

The multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) model has a promising capability of zero-shot translation, where it could directly translate between language pairs unseen during training. For good transfer performance from supervised directions to zero-shot directions, the multilingual NMT model is expected to learn universal representations across different languages. This paper introduces a cross-lingual consistency regularization, CrossConST, to bridge the representation gap among different languages and boost zero-shot translation performance. The theoretical analysis shows that CrossConST implicitly maximizes the probability distribution for zero-shot translation, and the experimental results on both low-resource and high-resource benchmarks show that CrossConST consistently improves the translation performance. The experimental analysis also proves that CrossConST could close the sentence representation gap and better align the representation space. Given the universality and simplicity of CrossConST, we believe it can serve as a strong baseline for future multilingual NMT research.

Zhiyuan Chen, Xiaomin Fang, Zixu Hua et al.

Efficient exploration of the chemical space to search the candidate drugs that satisfy various constraints is a fundamental task of drug discovery. Advanced deep generative methods attempt to optimize the molecules in the compact latent space instead of the discrete original space, but the mapping between the original and latent spaces is always kept unchanged during the entire optimization process. The unchanged mapping makes those methods challenging to fast adapt to various optimization scenes and leads to the great demand for assessed molecules (samples) to provide optimization direction, which is a considerable expense for drug discovery. To this end, we design a sample-efficient molecular generative method, HelixMO, which explores the scene-sensitive latent space to promote sample efficiency. The scene-sensitive latent space focuses more on modeling the promising molecules by dynamically adjusting the space mapping by leveraging the correlations between the general and scene-specific characteristics during the optimization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HelixMO can achieve competitive performance with only a few assessed samples on four molecular optimization scenes. Ablation studies verify the positive impact of the scene-specific latent space, which is capable of identifying the critical characteristics of the promising molecules. We also deployed HelixMO on the website PaddleHelix (https://paddlehelix.baidu.com/app/drug/drugdesign/forecast) to provide drug design service.

Zijing Liu, Xianbin Ye, Xiaomin Fang et al.

Machine learning shows great potential in virtual screening for drug discovery. Current efforts on accelerating docking-based virtual screening do not consider using existing data of other previously developed targets. To make use of the knowledge of the other targets and take advantage of the existing data, in this work, we apply multi-task learning to the problem of docking-based virtual screening. With two large docking datasets, the results of extensive experiments show that multi-task learning can achieve better performances on docking score prediction. By learning knowledge across multiple targets, the model trained by multi-task learning shows a better ability to adapt to a new target. Additional empirical study shows that other problems in drug discovery, such as the experimental drug-target affinity prediction, may also benefit from multi-task learning. Our results demonstrate that multi-task learning is a promising machine learning approach for docking-based virtual screening and accelerating the process of drug discovery.

Xin Tian, Liankai Huang, Yingzhan Lin et al.

In task-oriented dialogue systems, recent dialogue state tracking methods tend to perform one-pass generation of the dialogue state based on the previous dialogue state. The mistakes of these models made at the current turn are prone to be carried over to the next turn, causing error propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel Amendable Generation for Dialogue State Tracking (AG-DST), which contains a two-pass generation process: (1) generating a primitive dialogue state based on the dialogue of the current turn and the previous dialogue state, and (2) amending the primitive dialogue state from the first pass. With the additional amending generation pass, our model is tasked to learn more robust dialogue state tracking by amending the errors that still exist in the primitive dialogue state, which plays the role of reviser in the double-checking process and alleviates unnecessary error propagation. Experimental results show that AG-DST significantly outperforms previous works in two active DST datasets (MultiWOZ 2.2 and WOZ 2.0), achieving new state-of-the-art performances.

Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang et al.

To explore the limit of dialogue generation pre-training, we present the models of PLATO-XL with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on both Chinese and English social media conversations. To train such large models, we adopt the architecture of unified transformer with high computation and parameter efficiency. In addition, we carry out multi-party aware pre-training to better distinguish the characteristic information in social media conversations. With such designs, PLATO-XL successfully achieves superior performances as compared to other approaches in both Chinese and English chitchat. We further explore the capacity of PLATO-XL on other conversational tasks, such as knowledge grounded dialogue and task-oriented conversation. The experimental results indicate that PLATO-XL obtains state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI.

Zeming Liu, Haifeng Wang, Zheng-Yu Niu et al.

In this paper, we provide a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommendation dialog dataset (DuRecDial 2.0) to enable researchers to explore a challenging task of multilingual and cross-lingual conversational recommendation. The difference between DuRecDial 2.0 and existing conversational recommendation datasets is that the data item (Profile, Goal, Knowledge, Context, Response) in DuRecDial 2.0 is annotated in two languages, both English and Chinese, while other datasets are built with the setting of a single language. We collect 8.2k dialogs aligned across English and Chinese languages (16.5k dialogs and 255k utterances in total) that are annotated by crowdsourced workers with strict quality control procedure. We then build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation baselines on DuRecDial 2.0. Experiment results show that the use of additional English data can bring performance improvement for Chinese conversational recommendation, indicating the benefits of DuRecDial 2.0. Finally, this dataset provides a challenging testbed for future studies of monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation.

Hongxuan Tang, Hao Liu, Xinyan Xiao et al.

Recently, multimodal sentiment analysis has seen remarkable advance and a lot of datasets are proposed for its development. In general, current multimodal sentiment analysis datasets usually follow the traditional system of sentiment/emotion, such as positive, negative and so on. However, when applied in the scenario of video recommendation, the traditional sentiment/emotion system is hard to be leveraged to represent different contents of videos in the perspective of visual senses and language understanding. Based on this, we propose a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset, named baiDu Video Sentiment dataset (DuVideoSenti), and introduce a new sentiment system which is designed to describe the sentimental style of a video on recommendation scenery. Specifically, DuVideoSenti consists of 5,630 videos which displayed on Baidu, each video is manually annotated with a sentimental style label which describes the user's real feeling of a video. Furthermore, we propose UNIMO as our baseline for DuVideoSenti. Experimental results show that DuVideoSenti brings new challenges to multimodal sentiment analysis, and could be used as a new benchmark for evaluating approaches designed for video understanding and multimodal fusion. We also expect our proposed DuVideoSenti could further improve the development of multimodal sentiment analysis and its application to video recommendations.

Zhe Hu, Zhiwei Cao, Hou Pong Chan et al.

Controllable text generation is an appealing but challenging task, which allows users to specify particular attributes of the generated outputs. In this paper, we propose a controllable dialogue generation model to steer response generation under multi-attribute constraints. Specifically, we define and categorize the commonly used control attributes into global and local ones, which possess different granularities of effects on response generation. Then, we significantly extend the conventional seq2seq framework by introducing a novel two-stage decoder, which first uses a multi-grained style specification layer to impose the stylistic constraints and determine word-level control states of responses based on the attributes, and then employs a response generation layer to generate final responses maintaining both semantic relevancy to the contexts and fidelity to the attributes. Furthermore, we train our model with an attribute consistency reward to promote response control with explicit supervision signals. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses on two datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform competitive baselines in terms of response quality, content diversity and controllability.

Qing Liu, Hongyu Lin, Xinyan Xiao et al.

Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.

Jicheng Li, Pengzhi Gao, Xuanfu Wu et al.

Diverse machine translation aims at generating various target language translations for a given source language sentence. Leveraging the linear relationship in the sentence latent space introduced by the mixup training, we propose a novel method, MixDiversity, to generate different translations for the input sentence by linearly interpolating it with different sentence pairs sampled from the training corpus when decoding. To further improve the faithfulness and diversity of the translations, we propose two simple but effective approaches to select diverse sentence pairs in the training corpus and adjust the interpolation weight for each pair correspondingly. Moreover, by controlling the interpolation weight, our method can achieve the trade-off between faithfulness and diversity without any additional training, which is required in most of the previous methods. Experiments on WMT'16 en-ro, WMT'14 en-de, and WMT'17 zh-en are conducted to show that our method substantially outperforms all previous diverse machine translation methods.

Lijie Wang, Hao Liu, Shuyuan Peng et al.

While deep learning models have greatly improved the performance of most artificial intelligence tasks, they are often criticized to be untrustworthy due to the black-box problem. Consequently, many works have been proposed to study the trustworthiness of deep learning. However, as most open datasets are designed for evaluating the accuracy of model outputs, there is still a lack of appropriate datasets for evaluating the inner workings of neural networks. The lack of datasets obviously hinders the development of trustworthiness research. Therefore, in order to systematically evaluate the factors for building trustworthy systems, we propose a novel and well-annotated sentiment analysis dataset to evaluate robustness and interpretability. To evaluate these factors, our dataset contains diverse annotations about the challenging distribution of instances, manual adversarial instances and sentiment explanations. Several evaluation metrics are further proposed for interpretability and robustness. Based on the dataset and metrics, we conduct comprehensive comparisons for the trustworthiness of three typical models, and also study the relations between accuracy, robustness and interpretability. We release this trustworthiness evaluation dataset at \url{https://github/xyz} and hope our work can facilitate the progress on building more trustworthy systems for real-world applications.

Yu Sun, Shuohuan Wang, Shikun Feng et al.

Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).

Xiaomin Fang, Lihang Liu, Jieqiong Lei et al.

Effective molecular representation learning is of great importance to facilitate molecular property prediction, which is a fundamental task for the drug and material industry. Recent advances in graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in applying GNNs for molecular representation learning. Moreover, a few recent studies have also demonstrated successful applications of self-supervised learning methods to pre-train the GNNs to overcome the problem of insufficient labeled molecules. However, existing GNNs and pre-training strategies usually treat molecules as topological graph data without fully utilizing the molecular geometry information. Whereas, the three-dimensional (3D) spatial structure of a molecule, a.k.a molecular geometry, is one of the most critical factors for determining molecular physical, chemical, and biological properties. To this end, we propose a novel Geometry Enhanced Molecular representation learning method (GEM) for Chemical Representation Learning (ChemRL). At first, we design a geometry-based GNN architecture that simultaneously models atoms, bonds, and bond angles in a molecule. To be specific, we devised double graphs for a molecule: The first one encodes the atom-bond relations; The second one encodes bond-angle relations. Moreover, on top of the devised GNN architecture, we propose several novel geometry-level self-supervised learning strategies to learn spatial knowledge by utilizing the local and global molecular 3D structures. We compare ChemRL-GEM with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on different molecular benchmarks and exhibit that ChemRL-GEM can significantly outperform all baselines in both regression and classification tasks. For example, the experimental results show an overall improvement of 8.8% on average compared to SOTA baselines on the regression tasks, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method.

Weiyue Su, Xuyi Chen, Shikun Feng et al.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT adopt a training paradigm which first pretrain the model in general data and then finetune the model on task-specific data, and have recently achieved great success. However, PLMs are notorious for their enormous parameters and hard to be deployed on real-life applications. Knowledge distillation has been prevailing to address this problem by transferring knowledge from a large teacher to a much smaller student over a set of data. We argue that the selection of thee three key components, namely teacher, training data, and learning objective, is crucial to the effectiveness of distillation. We, therefore, propose a four-stage progressive distillation framework ERNIE-Tiny to compress PLM, which varies the three components gradually from general level to task-specific level. Specifically, the first stage, General Distillation, performs distillation with guidance from pretrained teacher, gerenal data and latent distillation loss. Then, General-Enhanced Distillation changes teacher model from pretrained teacher to finetuned teacher. After that, Task-Adaptive Distillation shifts training data from general data to task-specific data. In the end, Task-Specific Distillation, adds two additional losses, namely Soft-Label and Hard-Label loss onto the last stage. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and generalization gain brought by ERNIE-Tiny.In particular, experiments show that a 4-layer ERNIE-Tiny maintains over 98.0%performance of its 12-layer teacher BERT base on GLUE benchmark, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 1.0% GLUE score with the same amount of parameters. Moreover, ERNIE-Tiny achieves a new compression SOTA on five Chinese NLP tasks, outperforming BERT base by 0.4% accuracy with 7.5x fewer parameters and9.4x faster inference speed.

Wenhao Wu, Wei Li, Xinyan Xiao et al.

Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text. In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary. Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.

Bofeng Wu, Guocheng Niu, Jun Yu et al.

This paper proposes an approach to Dense Video Captioning (DVC) without pairwise event-sentence annotation. First, we adopt the knowledge distilled from relevant and well solved tasks to generate high-quality event proposals. Then we incorporate contrastive loss and cycle-consistency loss typically applied to cross-modal retrieval tasks to build semantic matching between the proposals and sentences, which are eventually used to train the caption generation module. In addition, the parameters of matching module are initialized via pre-training based on annotated images to improve the matching performance. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet-Caption dataset reveal the significance of distillation-based event proposal generation and cross-modal retrieval-based semantic matching to weakly supervised DVC, and demonstrate the superiority of our method to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Siqi Bao, Bingjin Chen, Huang He et al.

In this work, we explore the application of PLATO-2 on various dialogue systems, including open-domain conversation, knowledge grounded dialogue, and task-oriented conversation. PLATO-2 is initially designed as an open-domain chatbot, trained via two-stage curriculum learning. In the first stage, a coarse-grained response generation model is learned to fit the simplified one-to-one mapping relationship. This model is applied to the task-oriented conversation, given that the semantic mappings tend to be deterministic in task completion. In the second stage, another fine-grained generation model and an evaluation model are further learned for diverse response generation and coherence estimation, respectively. With superior capability on capturing one-to-many mapping, such models are suitable for the open-domain conversation and knowledge grounded dialogue. For the comprehensive evaluation of PLATO-2, we have participated in multiple tasks of DSTC9, including interactive evaluation of open-domain conversation (Track3-task2), static evaluation of knowledge grounded dialogue (Track3-task1), and end-to-end task-oriented conversation (Track2-task1). PLATO-2 has obtained the 1st place in all three tasks, verifying its effectiveness as a unified framework for various dialogue systems.

Ruiqing Zhang, Xiyang Wang, Chuanqiang Zhang et al.

This paper presents BSTC (Baidu Speech Translation Corpus), a large-scale Chinese-English speech translation dataset. This dataset is constructed based on a collection of licensed videos of talks or lectures, including about 68 hours of Mandarin data, their manual transcripts and translations into English, as well as automated transcripts by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. We have further asked three experienced interpreters to simultaneously interpret the testing talks in a mock conference setting. This corpus is expected to promote the research of automatic simultaneous translation as well as the development of practical systems. We have organized simultaneous translation tasks and used this corpus to evaluate automatic simultaneous translation systems.

Jialong Tang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin et al.

One of the biggest bottlenecks in building accurate, high coverage neural open IE systems is the need for large labelled corpora. The diversity of open domain corpora and the variety of natural language expressions further exacerbate this problem. In this paper, we propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach, which can learn neural open IE models without any human-labelled data by leveraging syntactic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervisions. Specifically, we first employ syntactic patterns as data labelling functions and pretrain a base model using the generated labels. Then we propose a syntactic and semantic-driven reinforcement learning algorithm, which can effectively generalize the base model to open situations with high accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model

Kun Wu, Lijie Wang, Zhenghua Li et al.

Data augmentation has attracted a lot of research attention in the deep learning era for its ability in alleviating data sparseness. The lack of labeled data for unseen evaluation databases is exactly the major challenge for cross-domain text-to-SQL parsing. Previous works either require human intervention to guarantee the quality of generated data, or fail to handle complex SQL queries. This paper presents a simple yet effective data augmentation framework. First, given a database, we automatically produce a large number of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. For better distribution matching, we require that at least 80% of SQL patterns in the training data are covered by generated queries. Second, we propose a hierarchical SQL-to-question generation model to obtain high-quality natural language questions, which is the major contribution of this work. Finally, we design a simple sampling strategy that can greatly improve training efficiency given large amounts of generated data. Experiments on three cross-domain datasets, i.e., WikiSQL and Spider in English, and DuSQL in Chinese, show that our proposed data augmentation framework can consistently improve performance over strong baselines, and the hierarchical generation component is the key for the improvement.

Huang He, Hua Lu, Siqi Bao et al.

The Track-1 of DSTC9 aims to effectively answer user requests or questions during task-oriented dialogues, which are out of the scope of APIs/DB. By leveraging external knowledge resources, relevant information can be retrieved and encoded into the response generation for these out-of-API-coverage queries. In this work, we have explored several advanced techniques to enhance the utilization of external knowledge and boost the quality of response generation, including schema guided knowledge decision, negatives enhanced knowledge selection, and knowledge grounded response generation. To evaluate the performance of our proposed method, comprehensive experiments have been carried out on the publicly available dataset. Our approach was ranked as the best in human evaluation of DSTC9 Track-1.

Siyu Ding, Junyuan Shang, Shuohuan Wang et al.

Transformers are not suited for processing long documents, due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. Simply truncating a long document or applying the sparse attention mechanism will incur the context fragmentation problem or lead to an inferior modeling capability against comparable model sizes. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Doc, a document-level language pretraining model based on Recurrence Transformers. Two well-designed techniques, namely the retrospective feed mechanism and the enhanced recurrence mechanism, enable ERNIE-Doc, which has a much longer effective context length, to capture the contextual information of a complete document. We pretrain ERNIE-Doc to explicitly learn the relationships among segments with an additional document-aware segment-reordering objective. Various experiments were conducted on both English and Chinese document-level tasks. ERNIE-Doc improved the state-of-the-art language modeling result of perplexity to 16.8 on WikiText-103. Moreover, it outperformed competitive pretraining models by a large margin on most language understanding tasks, such as text classification and question answering.

Xuan Ouyang, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained cross-lingual models achieve impressive performance in downstream cross-lingual tasks. This improvement benefits from learning a large amount of monolingual and parallel corpora. Although it is generally acknowledged that parallel corpora are critical for improving the model performance, existing methods are often constrained by the size of parallel corpora, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-M, a new training method that encourages the model to align the representation of multiple languages with monolingual corpora, to overcome the constraint that the parallel corpus size places on the model performance. Our key insight is to integrate back-translation into the pre-training process. We generate pseudo-parallel sentence pairs on a monolingual corpus to enable the learning of semantic alignments between different languages, thereby enhancing the semantic modeling of cross-lingual models. Experimental results show that ERNIE-M outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-lingual downstream tasks.

Jun Xu, Zeyang Lei, Haifeng Wang et al.

Learning interpretable dialog structure from human-human dialogs yields basic insights into the structure of conversation, and also provides background knowledge to facilitate dialog generation. In this paper, we conduct unsupervised discovery of dialog structure from chitchat corpora, and then leverage it to facilitate dialog generation in downstream systems. To this end, we present a Discrete Variational Auto-Encoder with Graph Neural Network (DVAE-GNN), to discover a unified human-readable dialog structure. The structure is a two-layer directed graph that contains session-level semantics in the upper-layer vertices, utterance-level semantics in the lower-layer vertices, and edges among these semantic vertices. In particular, we integrate GNN into DVAE to fine-tune utterance-level semantics for more effective recognition of session-level semantic vertex. Furthermore, to alleviate the difficulty of discovering a large number of utterance-level semantics, we design a coupling mechanism that binds each utterance-level semantic vertex with a distinct phrase to provide prior semantics. Experimental results on two benchmark corpora confirm that DVAE-GNN can discover meaningful dialog structure, and the use of dialog structure graph as background knowledge can facilitate a graph grounded conversational system to conduct coherent multi-turn dialog generation.

Wei Li, Can Gao, Guocheng Niu et al.

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e. text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e. image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a unified-modal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections can be utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space over a corpus of image-text pairs. As the non-paired single-modal data is very rich, our model can utilize much larger scale of data to learn more generalizable representations. Moreover, the textual knowledge and visual knowledge can enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO significantly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/

Yingqi Qu, Yuchen Ding, Jing Liu et al.

In open-domain question answering, dense passage retrieval has become a new paradigm to retrieve relevant passages for finding answers. Typically, the dual-encoder architecture is adopted to learn dense representations of questions and passages for semantic matching. However, it is difficult to effectively train a dual-encoder due to the challenges including the discrepancy between training and inference, the existence of unlabeled positives and limited training data. To address these challenges, we propose an optimized training approach, called RocketQA, to improving dense passage retrieval. We make three major technical contributions in RocketQA, namely cross-batch negatives, denoised hard negatives and data augmentation. The experiment results show that RocketQA significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions. We also conduct extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of the three strategies in RocketQA. Besides, we demonstrate that the performance of end-to-end QA can be improved based on our RocketQA retriever.

Fei Yu, Jiji Tang, Weichong Yin et al.

We propose a knowledge-enhanced approach, ERNIE-ViL, which incorporates structured knowledge obtained from scene graphs to learn joint representations of vision-language. ERNIE-ViL tries to build the detailed semantic connections (objects, attributes of objects and relationships between objects) across vision and language, which are essential to vision-language cross-modal tasks. Utilizing scene graphs of visual scenes, ERNIE-ViL constructs Scene Graph Prediction tasks, i.e., Object Prediction, Attribute Prediction and Relationship Prediction tasks in the pre-training phase. Specifically, these prediction tasks are implemented by predicting nodes of different types in the scene graph parsed from the sentence. Thus, ERNIE-ViL can learn the joint representations characterizing the alignments of the detailed semantics across vision and language. After pre-training on large scale image-text aligned datasets, we validate the effectiveness of ERNIE-ViL on 5 cross-modal downstream tasks. ERNIE-ViL achieves state-of-the-art performances on all these tasks and ranks the first place on the VCR leaderboard with an absolute improvement of 3.7%.