Thailand

Multi-task learning (MTL) has shown considerable practical benefits, particularly when using language models (LMs). While this is commonly achieved by learning tasks under a joint optimization procedure, some methods, such as AdapterFusion, divide the problem into two stages: (i) task learning, where knowledge specific to a task is encapsulated within sets of parameters (e.g., adapters), and (ii) transfer, where this already learned knowledge is leveraged for a target task. This separation of concerns provides numerous benefits (e.g., promoting reusability). However, current two stage MTL introduces a substantial number of additional parameters. We address this issue by leveraging the usefulness of linearly scaling the output representations of source adapters for transfer learning. We introduce ScaLearn, a simple and highly parameter-efficient two-stage MTL method that capitalizes on the knowledge of the source tasks by learning a minimal set of scaling parameters that enable effective transfer to a target task. Our experiments on three benchmarks (GLUE, SuperGLUE, and HumSet) and two encoder LMs show that ScaLearn consistently outperforms strong baselines with a small number of transfer parameters ($\sim0.35$\% of those of AdapterFusion). Remarkably, we observe that ScaLearn maintains its strong abilities even when further reducing parameters, achieving competitive results with only 8 transfer parameters per target task. Our proposed approach thus demonstrates the power of simple scaling as a promise for more efficient task transfer. Our code is available at https://github.com/CPJKU/ScaLearn.

ACL 2024

ScaLearn: Simple and Highly Parameter-Efficient Task Transfer by Learning to Scale

parameter-efficiency

modularity

multi-task learning

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poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Large-scale deployment of generative AI tools often depends on costly API calls to a Large Language Model (LLM) to fulfil user queries, a process that also exposes the request stream to external providers. To curtail the frequency of these calls, one can employ a local smaller language model -a student- which is continuously trained on the responses of the LLM. This student gradually gains proficiency in independently handling an increasing number of user requests, a process we term neural caching. The crucial element in neural caching is a policy that decides which requests should be processed by the student alone and which should be redirected to the LLM, subsequently aiding the student’s learning. In this study, we focus on classification tasks, and we consider a range of classic Active Learning-based selection criteria as the policy. Our experiments suggest that Margin Sampling and Query by Committee bring consistent benefits over other policies and baselines across tasks and budgets.

Cache & Distil: Optimising API Calls to Large Language Models

Hierarchical text classification aims at categorizing texts into a multi-tiered tree-structured hierarchy of labels. Existing methods pay more attention to capture hierarchy-aware text feature by exploiting explicit parent-child relationships, while interactions between peer labels are rarely taken into account, resulting in severe label confusion within each layer. In this work, we propose a novel Dual Prompt Tuning (DPT) method, which emphasizes identifying discrimination among peer labels by performing contrastive learning on each hierarchical layer. We design an innovative hand-crafted prompt containing slots for both positive and negative label predictions to cooperate with contrastive learning. In addition, we introduce a label hierarchy self-sensing auxiliary task to ensure cross-layer label consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPT achieves significant improvements and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on BGC and RCV1-V2 benchmark datasets.

Dual Prompt Tuning based Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification

Supervised machine-learning models for predicting user behavior offer a challenging classification problem with lower average prediction performance scores than other text classification tasks. This study evaluates multi-task learning frameworks grounded in Cognitive Appraisal Theory to predict user behavior as a function of users' self-expression and psychological attributes. Our experiments show that users' language and traits improve predictions above and beyond models predicting only from text. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating psychological constructs into NLP to enhance the understanding and prediction of user actions. We close with a discussion of the implications for future applications of large language models for computational psychology.

Beyond Text: Leveraging Multi-Task Learning and Cognitive Appraisal Theory for Post-Purchase Intention Analysis

We introduce Bonito, an open-source model for conditional task generation that converts unannotated text into task-specific training datasets for instruction tuning. We aim to enable zero-shot task adaptation of large language models on users' specialized, private data. We train Bonito by fine-tuning a pretrained large language model on a new large-scale dataset with 1.65M examples created by remixing existing instruction tuning datasets into meta-templates. The meta-templates for a dataset produce training examples where the input is the unannotated text and the task attribute and the output consists of the instruction and the response. We use Bonito to generate synthetic tasks for seven datasets from specialized domains with unannotated text across three task types---yes-no question answering, extractive question answering, and natural language inference---and adapt language models. We show that Bonito significantly improves the average performance of pretrained and instruction tuned models over the de facto self supervised baseline. For example, adapting Mistral-Instruct-v2 and instruction tuned variants of Mistral and Llama2 with Bonito improves the strong zero-shot performance by 22.1 F1 points whereas the next word prediction objective undoes some of the benefits of instruction tuning and reduces the average performance by 0.8 F1 points. We conduct additional experiments with Bonito to understand the effects of the domain, the size of the training set, and the choice of alternative synthetic task generators. Overall, we show that learning with synthetic instruction tuning datasets is an effective way to adapt language models to new domains. The model, dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/BatsResearch/bonito.

Learning to Generate Instruction Tuning Datasets for Zero-Shot Task Adaptation

Event linking connects event mentions in text with relevant nodes in a knowledge base (KB). Prior research in event linking has mainly borrowed methods from entity linking, overlooking the distinct features of events. Compared to the extensively explored entity linking task, events have more complex structures and can be more effectively distinguished by examining their associated arguments. Moreover, the information-rich nature of events leads to the scarcity of event KBs. This emphasizes the need for event linking models to identify and classify event mentions not in the KB as ``out-of-KB,'' an area that has received limited attention. In this work, we tackle these challenges by introducing an argument-aware approach. First, we improve event linking models by augmenting input text with tagged event argument information, facilitating the recognition of key information about event mentions. Subsequently, to help the model handle "out-of-KB" scenarios, we synthesize out-of-KB training examples from in-KB instances through controlled manipulation of event arguments. Our experiment across two test datasets showed significant enhancements in both in-KB and out-of-KB scenarios, with a notable 22% improvement in out-of-KB evaluations.

Argument-Aware Approach To Event Linking

Grounded generation aims to equip language models (LMs) with the ability to produce more credible and accountable responses by accurately citing verifiable sources. However, existing methods, by either feeding LMs with raw or preprocessed materials, remain prone to errors. To address this, we introduce CaLM, a novel verification framework. CaLM leverages the insight that a robust grounded response should be consistent with information derived solely from its cited sources. Our framework empowers smaller LMs, which rely less on parametric memory and excel at processing relevant information given a query, to validate the output of larger LMs. Larger LM responses that closely align with the smaller LMs' output, which relies exclusively on cited documents, are verified. Responses showing discrepancies are iteratively refined through a feedback loop. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets demonstrate significant performance gains of 1.5% to 7% absolute average without any required model fine-tuning.

CaLM: Contrasting Large and Small Language Models to Verify Grounded Generation

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there’s currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners’ intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) — a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.

SMART: Submodular Data Mixture Strategy for Instruction Tuning

Existing work on Temporal Question Answering (TQA) has predominantly focused on questions anchored to specific timestamps or events (e.g. 'Who was the US president in 1970?'). Little work has studied questions whose temporal context is relative to the present time (e.g. 'Who was the previous US president?'). We refer to this problem as Present-Anchored Temporal QA (PATQA). PATQA poses unique challenges: (1) large language models (LLMs) may have outdated knowledge, (2) complex temporal relationships (e.g. 'before', 'previous') are hard to reason, (3) multi-hop reasoning may be required, and (4) the gold answers of benchmarks must be continuously updated. To address these challenges, we introduce the PAT-Questions benchmark, which includes single and multi-hop temporal questions. The answers in PAT-Questions can be automatically refreshed by re-running SPARQL queries on a knowledge graph, if available. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs and a SOTA temporal reasoning model (TEMPREASON-T5) on PAT-Questions through direct prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The results highlight the limitations of existing solutions in PATQA and motivate the need for new methods to improve PATQA reasoning capabilities.

PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) task is to infer the missing knowledge in the knowledge graph based on known factual triples. However, present KGC approaches still face the following two challenges. Those methods perform simple linear update on relation representation, and only local neighborhood information is aggregated, which makes it difficult to capture logic semantic between relations and global topological context information. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a unified joint approach with Topological Context learning and Rule Augmentation (TCRA) for KGC. The TCRA framework consists of an entity topological context learning mechanism based on dual-branch hierarchical graph attention network, and a relation rule context learning mechanism based on Rule-Transformer and rule-to-relation aggregator. The former mechanism encodes the topological structure features of entities, aggregates the local neighborhood topological context information of entities on the three levels (entity, relation and triple), and build clusters of global head or tail entities related to the same relation. It can capture the local and global topological context information of entities related to the same relation. The latter mechanism introduces chain-like Horn rules as the context information of relations, and encodes the logical semantic of relations to enrich the relation representation. Experimental performances on three benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR and Kinship indicate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach. The codes are publicly available.

A Unified Joint Approach with Topological Context Learning and Rule Augmentation for Knowledge Graph Completion

Recently, multi-task instruction tuning has been utilized to improve sentence representation learning~(SRL). 
It enables SRL models to generate task-specific representations with the guidance of task instruction, thus exhibiting strong generalization ability on unseen tasks. 
However, these methods mostly neglect the potential interference problems across different tasks and instances, which may affect the training of the model.
To address this issue, we propose a data curriculum method, namely **Data-CUBE**, that arranges the order of all the multi-task data for training, to minimize the interference risks from two aspects.
At the task level, we aim to find the optimal task order to minimize the total cross-task interference risk and formulate this problem as the traveling salesman problem, which is further solved by a specially designed simulated annealing algorithm. 
At the instance level, we propose a measurement method to quantify the difficulty of all instances per task, and then arrange instances in an easy-to-difficult order for training.
Experimental results show that our approach can boost the performance of state-of-the-art methods. 
Our code and data will be publicly released.

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Cache & Distil: Optimising API Calls to Large Language Models

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