AI Technology & Industry Review
A research team from the University of Washington, Facebook AI Research and the Allen Institute for AI introduces Meta-training for InContext Learning (MetaICL), a new meta-training framework for few-shot learning where an LM is meta-trained to learn in-context — conditioning on training examples to recover the task and make predictions.
In the new paper LMSOC: An Approach for Socially Sensitive Pretraining, a Twitter Cortex research team proposes a simple but effective approach for learning both linguistically contextualized and socially sensitive representations in large-scale language models.
Facebook AI Research proposes NormFormer, an approach that improves pretraining perplexity and downstream task performance for both causal and masked language models, achieving GPT3-Large (1.3B) zero-shot performance 60 percent faster and improving fine-tuned GLUE performance by 1.9 percent.
A research team from the University of Southern California and Google proposes TOME, a “mention memory” approach to factual knowledge extraction for NLU tasks. A transformer model with attention over a semi-parametric representation of the entire Wikipedia text corpus, TOME can extract information without supervision and achieves strong performance on multiple open-domain question answering benchmarks.
On October 11, Microsoft introduced the largest and “the most powerful monolithic transformer language model” trained to date, a 530 billion parameter GPT-3-style generative language model.
In the paper Fine-Tuned Transformers Show Clusters of Similar Representations Across Layers, a research team from New York University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill uses centered kernel alignment (CKA) to measure the similarity of representations across layers and explore how fine-tuning changes transformers’ learned representations.
A Google AI research team explores zero-label learning (training with synthetic data only) in natural language processing, and introduces Unsupervised Data Generation (UDG), a training data creation procedure designed to synthesize high-quality training data without human annotations.
MIT researchers present an automated, objective and transparent data-driven method for measuring media bias. The study analyses roughly a million articles from about a hundred newspapers for bias on various news topics, maps the newspapers into a two-dimensional media bias landscape, and shows that the data-driven results agree well with human-judgement classifications.
A LinkedIn research team evaluates deep natural language processing (NLP) on various representative search engine tasks to provide insights for the development of industry search engines.
An Apple research team explores multiple architectures and training procedures to develop a novel multi-speaker and multi-lingual neural TTS system. The study combines speech from 30 speakers from 15 locales in 8 languages, and demonstrates that for the vast majority of voices, such multi-lingual and multi-speaker models can yield better quality than single speaker models.
A Huawei research team proposes a topic-based personalized ranking model (TPRM) that integrates pretrained contextualized term representations and user profiles constructed by a topic model to tailor the output ranking list.
A Google Research team explores the design space of Transformer models in an effort to enable deep learning architectures to solve compositional tasks. The proposed approach provides models with inductive biases via design decisions that significantly impact compositional generalization, and achieves state-of-the-art results on the COGS and PCFG composition benchmarks.
On August 5, WeChat AI and Beijing Jiaotong University system developers released the paper WeChat Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT21, revealing the architecture of their novel neural machine translation (NMT) system and the strategies they adopted to achieve impressive performance in the WMT21 competition.
A Google Research team draws inspiration from two numerical analysis methods — Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) and Multigrid — to address the quadratic complexity problem of attention mechanisms in transformer architectures, proposing a hierarchical attention scheme that has linear complexity in run time and memory.
A research team from the University of Melbourne, Facebook AI, and Twitter Cortex proposes a black-box test method for assessing and debugging the numerical translation of neural machine translation systems in a systematic manner. The approach reveals novel types of errors that are general across multiple state-of-the-art translation systems.
A Google Research team proposes Wordcraft, a text editor with a built-in AI-powered creative writing assistant. Wordcraft uses few-shot learning and the natural affordances of conversation to support a variety of user interactions; and can help with story planning, writing and editing.
A research team from OpenAI proposes Codex, a specialized GPT model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub that can produce functionally correct Python code bodies from natural language docstrings and could excel at a variety of coding tasks.
A research team from ByteDance AI Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison and Nanjing University wins the ACL 2021 best paper award. Their proposed Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport (VOLT) approach leverages optimal transport to automatically find an optimal vocabulary without trial training.
A Google Research team proposes MergeDistill, a framework for merging pretrained teacher LMs from multiple monolingual/multilingual LMs into a single multilingual task-agnostic student LM to leverage the capabilities of the powerful language-specific LMs while still being multilingual and enabling positive language transfer.
A research team from Google proposes ByT5 architecture, a competitive token-free pretrained byte-to-byte transformer that can be straightforwardly adapted to process byte sequences without adding excessive computational cost.
A research team from UC Davis, Microsoft Research and Johns Hopkins University extends work on training massive amounts of linguistic data to reveal the grammatical structures in their representations to the domain of mathematical reasoning, showing that both the standard transformer and the TP-Transformer can compose the meanings of mathematical symbols based on their structured relationships.
A research team from Microsoft Research and Peking University peeps into pretrained transformers and investigates how factual knowledge is stored, proposing a method to identify “knowledge neurons,” which can be utilized to explicitly update and erase facts.
A research team from McGill University, Mila – Quebec AI Institute and Facebook AI proposes novel metrics and perturbation functions to detect, quantify and compare trade-offs between robustness and faithfulness in NMT systems, both on the corpus level and with particular examples.
An IBM research team proposes four multilingual adversarial attack strategies and attacks seven languages in a zero-shot setting on large multilingual pretrained language models (e.g. MBERT), reducing average performance by up to 85.6 percent.
A Yann LeCun team proposes dictionary learning to provide detailed visualizations of transformer representations and insights into semantic structures such as word-level disambiguation, sentence-level pattern formation, and long-range dependency captured by transformers.
The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) releases Wu Dao 1.0, China’s first large-scale pretraining model.
A Microsoft research team provides concrete evidence showing that existing NLP models cannot robustly solve even the simplest of Math word problems, suggesting the hope that they might capably handle one-unknown arithmetic MWPs is untenable.
To track progress in natural language generation (NLG) models, 55 researchers from more than 40 prestigious institutions have proposed GEM (Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics), a “living benchmark” NLG evaluation environment.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield, Beihang University, and Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute have proposed a transfer learning approach that can automatically process historical texts at a semantic level to generate modern language summaries.
Researchers from Drexel University, Northeastern University and IT University Copenhagen explore how humans interact with AI in such contexts, with a focus on computer games.
Google Brain’s Switch Transformer language model packs a whopping 1.6 trillion parameters while effectively controlling computational cost. The model achieved a 4x pretraining speedup over a strongly tuned T5-XXL baseline.
A new model surpassed human baseline performance on the challenging natural language understanding benchmark.
OpenAI has trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
Airbus has developed a new Smart Librarian (SL) FCOM QA system comprising a dialogue engine, retriever (search engine), and QA module.
In EMNLP 2020, a Montreal-based research team introduced a large medical text dataset designed to boost abbreviation disambiguation in the medical domain.
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020) kicked off on Monday as a virtual conference.
A new study proposes using human feedback and interaction logs to boost offline reinforcement learning (RL) in natural language processing (NLP).
Amazon Alexa AI paper asks whether NLU problems could be mapped to question-answering (QA) problems using transfer learning.
Amazon extracts an optimal subset of architectural parameters for BERT architecture by applying recent breakthroughs in algorithms for neural architecture search.
Google recently introduced mT5, a multilingual variant of its “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5), pretrained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages.