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Chuanqi Tan

Publications and source records attributed to Chuanqi Tan.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

SeqDiffuSeq: Text Diffusion with Encoder-Decoder Transformers

Diffusion model, a new generative modelling paradigm, has achieved great success in image, audio, and video generation. However, considering the discrete categorical nature of text, it is not trivial to extend continuous diffusion models to natural language, and text diffusion models are less studied. Sequence-to-sequence text generation is one of the essential natural language processing topics. In this work, we apply diffusion models to approach sequence-to-sequence text generation, and explore whether the superiority generation performance of diffusion model can transfer to natural language domain. We propose SeqDiffuSeq, a text diffusion model for sequence-to-sequence generation. SeqDiffuSeq uses an encoder-decoder Transformers architecture to model denoising function. In order to improve generation quality, SeqDiffuSeq combines the self-conditioning technique and a newly proposed adaptive noise schedule technique. The adaptive noise schedule has the difficulty of denoising evenly distributed across time steps, and considers exclusive noise schedules for tokens at different positional order. Experiment results illustrate the good performance on sequence-to-sequence generation in terms of text quality and inference time.

cs.CL↗

HyPe: Better Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning with Hidden Representation Perturbation

Language models with the Transformers structure have shown great performance in natural language processing. However, there still poses problems when fine-tuning pre-trained language models on downstream tasks, such as over-fitting or representation collapse. In this work, we propose HyPe, a simple yet effective fine-tuning technique to alleviate such problems by perturbing hidden representations of Transformers layers. Unlike previous works that only add noise to inputs or parameters, we argue that the hidden representations of Transformers layers convey more diverse and meaningful language information. Therefore, making the Transformers layers more robust to hidden representation perturbations can further benefit the fine-tuning of PLMs en bloc. We conduct extensive experiments and analyses on GLUE and other natural language inference datasets. Results demonstrate that HyPe outperforms vanilla fine-tuning and enhances generalization of hidden representations from different layers. In addition, HyPe acquires negligible computational overheads, and is better than and compatible with previous state-of-the-art fine-tuning techniques.

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LOGEN: Few-shot Logical Knowledge-Conditioned Text Generation with Self-training

Natural language generation from structured data mainly focuses on surface-level descriptions, suffering from uncontrollable content selection and low fidelity. Previous works leverage logical forms to facilitate logical knowledge-conditioned text generation. Though achieving remarkable progress, they are data-hungry, which makes the adoption for real-world applications challenging with limited data. To this end, this paper proposes a unified framework for logical knowledge-conditioned text generation in the few-shot setting. With only a few seeds logical forms (e.g., 20/100 shot), our approach leverages self-training and samples pseudo logical forms based on content and structure consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can obtain better few-shot performance than baselines.

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VECO 2.0: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training with Multi-granularity Contrastive Learning

Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of cross-lingual transferability by training a unified Transformer encoder for multiple languages. In addition to involving the masked language model objective, existing cross-lingual pre-training works leverage sentence-level contrastive learning or plugs in extra cross-attention module to complement the insufficient capabilities of cross-lingual alignment. Nonetheless, synonym pairs residing in bilingual corpus are not exploited and aligned, which is more crucial than sentence interdependence establishment for token-level tasks. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual pre-trained model VECO~2.0 based on contrastive learning with multi-granularity alignments. Specifically, the sequence-to-sequence alignment is induced to maximize the similarity of the parallel pairs and minimize the non-parallel pairs. Then, token-to-token alignment is integrated to bridge the gap between synonymous tokens excavated via the thesaurus dictionary from the other unpaired tokens in a bilingual instance. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for cross-lingual model pre-training on the XTREME benchmark.

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How well do Large Language Models perform in Arithmetic tasks?

Large language models have emerged abilities including chain-of-thought to answer math word problems step by step. Solving math word problems not only requires abilities to disassemble problems via chain-of-thought but also needs to calculate arithmetic expressions correctly for each step. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work to focus on evaluating the arithmetic ability of large language models. In this work, we propose an arithmetic dataset MATH 401 to test the latest large language models including GPT-4, ChatGPT, InstrctGPT, Galactica, and LLaMA with various arithmetic expressions and provide a detailed analysis of the ability of large language models. MATH 401 and evaluation codes are released at \url{https://github.com/GanjinZero/math401-llm}.

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RAMM: Retrieval-augmented Biomedical Visual Question Answering with Multi-modal Pre-training

Vision-and-language multi-modal pretraining and fine-tuning have shown great success in visual question answering (VQA). Compared to general domain VQA, the performance of biomedical VQA suffers from limited data. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented pretrain-and-finetune paradigm named RAMM for biomedical VQA to overcome the data limitation issue. Specifically, we collect a new biomedical dataset named PMCPM which offers patient-based image-text pairs containing diverse patient situations from PubMed. Then, we pretrain the biomedical multi-modal model to learn visual and textual representation for image-text pairs and align these representations with image-text contrastive objective (ITC). Finally, we propose a retrieval-augmented method to better use the limited data. We propose to retrieve similar image-text pairs based on ITC from pretraining datasets and introduce a novel retrieval-attention module to fuse the representation of the image and the question with the retrieved images and texts. Experiments demonstrate that our retrieval-augmented pretrain-and-finetune paradigm obtains state-of-the-art performance on Med-VQA2019, Med-VQA2021, VQARAD, and SLAKE datasets. Further analysis shows that the proposed RAMM and PMCPM can enhance biomedical VQA performance compared with previous resources and methods. We will open-source our dataset, codes, and pretrained model.

cs.CV↗

Molecular Geometry-aware Transformer for accurate 3D Atomic System modeling

Molecular dynamic simulations are important in computational physics, chemistry, material, and biology. Machine learning-based methods have shown strong abilities in predicting molecular energy and properties and are much faster than DFT calculations. Molecular energy is at least related to atoms, bonds, bond angles, torsion angles, and nonbonding atom pairs. Previous Transformer models only use atoms as inputs which lack explicit modeling of the aforementioned factors. To alleviate this limitation, we propose Moleformer, a novel Transformer architecture that takes nodes (atoms) and edges (bonds and nonbonding atom pairs) as inputs and models the interactions among them using rotational and translational invariant geometry-aware spatial encoding. Proposed spatial encoding calculates relative position information including distances and angles among nodes and edges. We benchmark Moleformer on OC20 and QM9 datasets, and our model achieves state-of-the-art on the initial state to relaxed energy prediction of OC20 and is very competitive in QM9 on predicting quantum chemical properties compared to other Transformer and Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods which proves the effectiveness of the proposed geometry-aware spatial encoding in Moleformer.

q-bio.MN↗

SpanProto: A Two-stage Span-based Prototypical Network for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to identify named entities with very little annotated data. Previous methods solve this problem based on token-wise classification, which ignores the information of entity boundaries, and inevitably the performance is affected by the massive non-entity tokens. To this end, we propose a seminal span-based prototypical network (SpanProto) that tackles few-shot NER via a two-stage approach, including span extraction and mention classification. In the span extraction stage, we transform the sequential tags into a global boundary matrix, enabling the model to focus on the explicit boundary information. For mention classification, we leverage prototypical learning to capture the semantic representations for each labeled span and make the model better adapt to novel-class entities. To further improve the model performance, we split out the false positives generated by the span extractor but not labeled in the current episode set, and then present a margin-based loss to separate them from each prototype region. Experiments over multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.

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LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting

Most NER methods rely on extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in the low-resource scenarios with limited training data. Existing dominant approaches usually suffer from the challenge that the target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain, which can be concluded as class transfer and domain transfer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting (LightNER). Specifically, we construct the unified learnable verbalizer of entity categories to generate the entity span sequence and entity categories without any label-specific classifiers, thus addressing the class transfer issue. We further propose a pluggable guidance module by incorporating learnable parameters into the self-attention layer as guidance, which can re-modulate the attention and adapt pre-trained weights. Note that we only tune those inserted module with the whole parameter of the pre-trained language model fixed, thus, making our approach lightweight and flexible for low-resource scenarios and can better transfer knowledge across domains. Experimental results show that LightNER can obtain comparable performance in the standard supervised setting and outperform strong baselines in low-resource settings. Code is in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/ner/few-shot.

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Contrastive Triple Extraction with Generative Transformer

Triple extraction is an essential task in information extraction for natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we revisit the end-to-end triple extraction task for sequence generation. Since generative triple extraction may struggle to capture long-term dependencies and generate unfaithful triples, we introduce a novel model, contrastive triple extraction with a generative transformer. Specifically, we introduce a single shared transformer module for encoder-decoder-based generation. To generate faithful results, we propose a novel triplet contrastive training object. Moreover, we introduce two mechanisms to further improve model performance (i.e., batch-wise dynamic attention-masking and triple-wise calibration). Experimental results on three datasets (i.e., NYT, WebNLG, and MIE) show that our approach achieves better performance than that of baselines.

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Parameter-Efficient Sparsity for Large Language Models Fine-Tuning

With the dramatically increased number of parameters in language models, sparsity methods have received ever-increasing research focus to compress and accelerate the models. While most research focuses on how to accurately retain appropriate weights while maintaining the performance of the compressed model, there are challenges in the computational overhead and memory footprint of sparse training when compressing large-scale language models. To address this problem, we propose a Parameter-efficient Sparse Training (PST) method to reduce the number of trainable parameters during sparse-aware training in downstream tasks. Specifically, we first combine the data-free and data-driven criteria to efficiently and accurately measure the importance of weights. Then we investigate the intrinsic redundancy of data-driven weight importance and derive two obvious characteristics i.e., low-rankness and structuredness. Based on that, two groups of small matrices are introduced to compute the data-driven importance of weights, instead of using the original large importance score matrix, which therefore makes the sparse training resource-efficient and parameter-efficient. Experiments with diverse networks (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2) on dozens of datasets demonstrate PST performs on par or better than previous sparsity methods, despite only training a small number of parameters. For instance, compared with previous sparsity methods, our PST only requires 1.5% trainable parameters to achieve comparable performance on BERT.

cs.AI↗

Towards Unified Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Text Classification

Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted the performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification by employing task-specific prompts. Yet, PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which limits the few-shot learning performance on downstream tasks. It would be desirable if the models can acquire some prompting knowledge before adaptation to specific NLP tasks. We present the Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT) framework, leading to better few-shot text classification for BERT-style models by explicitly capturing prompting semantics from non-target NLP datasets. In UPT, a novel paradigm Prompt-Options-Verbalizer is proposed for joint prompt learning across different NLP tasks, forcing PLMs to capture task-invariant prompting knowledge. We further design a self-supervised task named Knowledge-enhanced Selective Masked Language Modeling to improve the PLM's generalization abilities for accurate adaptation to previously unseen tasks. After multi-task learning across multiple tasks, the PLM can be better prompt-tuned towards any dissimilar target tasks in low-resourced settings. Experiments over a variety of NLP tasks show that UPT consistently outperforms state-of-the-arts for prompt-based fine-tuning.

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Good Visual Guidance Makes A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction

Multimodal named entity recognition and relation extraction (MNER and MRE) is a fundamental and crucial branch in information extraction. However, existing approaches for MNER and MRE usually suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images incorporated in texts. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel Hierarchical Visual Prefix fusion NeTwork (HVPNeT) for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction, aiming to achieve more effective and robust performance. Specifically, we regard visual representation as pluggable visual prefix to guide the textual representation for error insensitive forecasting decision. We further propose a dynamic gated aggregation strategy to achieve hierarchical multi-scaled visual features as visual prefix for fusion. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/HVPNeT.

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Differentiable Prompt Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners

Large-scale pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to natural language processing by demonstrating remarkable abilities as few-shot learners. However, their effectiveness depends mainly on scaling the model parameters and prompt design, hindering their implementation in most real-world applications. This study proposes a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named DifferentiAble pRompT (DART), which can convert small language models into better few-shot learners without any prompt engineering. The main principle behind this approach involves reformulating potential natural language processing tasks into the task of a pre-trained language model and differentially optimizing the prompt template as well as the target label with backpropagation. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged to any pre-trained language models; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks. A comprehensive evaluation of standard NLP tasks demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves a better few-shot performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DART.

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Fusing Heterogeneous Factors with Triaffine Mechanism for Nested Named Entity Recognition

Nested entities are observed in many domains due to their compositionality, which cannot be easily recognized by the widely-used sequence labeling framework. A natural solution is to treat the task as a span classification problem. To learn better span representation and increase classification performance, it is crucial to effectively integrate heterogeneous factors including inside tokens, boundaries, labels, and related spans which could be contributing to nested entities recognition. To fuse these heterogeneous factors, we propose a novel triaffine mechanism including triaffine attention and scoring. Triaffine attention uses boundaries and labels as queries and uses inside tokens and related spans as keys and values for span representations. Triaffine scoring interacts with boundaries and span representations for classification. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms previous span-based methods, achieves the state-of-the-art $F_1$ scores on nested NER datasets GENIA and KBP2017, and shows comparable results on ACE2004 and ACE2005.

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Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding

Automatic ICD coding is defined as assigning disease codes to electronic medical records (EMRs). Existing methods usually apply label attention with code representations to match related text snippets. Unlike these works that model the label with the code hierarchy or description, we argue that the code synonyms can provide more comprehensive knowledge based on the observation that the code expressions in EMRs vary from their descriptions in ICD. By aligning codes to concepts in UMLS, we collect synonyms of every code. Then, we propose a multiple synonyms matching network to leverage synonyms for better code representation learning, and finally help the code classification. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

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CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the recent progress in biomedical language understanding, is gradually changing medical practice. With the development of biomedical language understanding benchmarks, AI applications are widely used in the medical field. However, most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it challenging to replicate many of the successes in English for other languages. To facilitate research in this direction, we collect real-world biomedical data and present the first Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (CBLUE) benchmark: a collection of natural language understanding tasks including named entity recognition, information extraction, clinical diagnosis normalization, single-sentence/sentence-pair classification, and an associated online platform for model evaluation, comparison, and analysis. To establish evaluation on these tasks, we report empirical results with the current 11 pre-trained Chinese models, and experimental results show that state-of-the-art neural models perform by far worse than the human ceiling. Our benchmark is released at \url{https://tianchi.aliyun.com/dataset/dataDetail?dataId=95414&lang=en-us}.

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Normal vs. Adversarial: Salience-based Analysis of Adversarial Samples for Relation Extraction

Recent neural-based relation extraction approaches, though achieving promising improvement on benchmark datasets, have reported their vulnerability towards adversarial attacks. Thus far, efforts mostly focused on generating adversarial samples or defending adversarial attacks, but little is known about the difference between normal and adversarial samples. In this work, we take the first step to leverage the salience-based method to analyze those adversarial samples. We observe that salience tokens have a direct correlation with adversarial perturbations. We further find the adversarial perturbations are either those tokens not existing in the training set or superficial cues associated with relation labels. To some extent, our approach unveils the characters against adversarial samples. We release an open-source testbed, "DiagnoseAdv" in https://github.com/zjunlp/DiagnoseAdv.

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