arXiv subjects

Jane Dwivedi-Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Jane Dwivedi-Yu.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Augmented Language Models: a Survey

This survey reviews works in which language models (LMs) are augmented with reasoning skills and the ability to use tools. The former is defined as decomposing a potentially complex task into simpler subtasks while the latter consists in calling external modules such as a code interpreter. LMs can leverage these augmentations separately or in combination via heuristics, or learn to do so from demonstrations. While adhering to a standard missing tokens prediction objective, such augmented LMs can use various, possibly non-parametric external modules to expand their context processing ability, thus departing from the pure language modeling paradigm. We therefore refer to them as Augmented Language Models (ALMs). The missing token objective allows ALMs to learn to reason, use tools, and even act, while still performing standard natural language tasks and even outperforming most regular LMs on several benchmarks. In this work, after reviewing current advance in ALMs, we conclude that this new research direction has the potential to address common limitations of traditional LMs such as interpretability, consistency, and scalability issues.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce Toolformer, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. This is done in a self-supervised way, requiring nothing more than a handful of demonstrations for each API. We incorporate a range of tools, including a calculator, a Q\&A system, two different search engines, a translation system, and a calendar. Toolformer achieves substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks, often competitive with much larger models, without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Atlas: Few-shot Learning with Retrieval Augmented Language Models

Large language models have shown impressive few-shot results on a wide range of tasks. However, when knowledge is key for such results, as is the case for tasks such as question answering and fact checking, massive parameter counts to store knowledge seem to be needed. Retrieval augmented models are known to excel at knowledge intensive tasks without the need for as many parameters, but it is unclear whether they work in few-shot settings. In this work we present Atlas, a carefully designed and pre-trained retrieval augmented language model able to learn knowledge intensive tasks with very few training examples. We perform evaluations on a wide range of tasks, including MMLU, KILT and NaturalQuestions, and study the impact of the content of the document index, showing that it can easily be updated. Notably, Atlas reaches over 42% accuracy on Natural Questions using only 64 examples, outperforming a 540B parameters model by 3% despite having 50x fewer parameters.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

EditEval: An Instruction-Based Benchmark for Text Improvements

Evaluation of text generation to date has primarily focused on content created sequentially, rather than improvements on a piece of text. Writing, however, is naturally an iterative and incremental process that requires expertise in different modular skills such as fixing outdated information or making the style more consistent. Even so, comprehensive evaluation of a model's capacity to perform these skills and the ability to edit remains sparse. This work presents EditEval: An instruction-based, benchmark and evaluation suite that leverages high-quality existing and new datasets for automatic evaluation of editing capabilities such as making text more cohesive and paraphrasing. We evaluate several pre-trained models, which shows that InstructGPT and PEER perform the best, but that most baselines fall below the supervised SOTA, particularly when neutralizing and updating information. Our analysis also shows that commonly used metrics for editing tasks do not always correlate well, and that optimization for prompts with the highest performance does not necessarily entail the strongest robustness to different models. Through the release of this benchmark and a publicly available leaderboard challenge, we hope to unlock future research in developing models capable of iterative and more controllable editing.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

PEER: A Collaborative Language Model

Textual content is often the output of a collaborative writing process: We start with an initial draft, ask for suggestions, and repeatedly make changes. Agnostic of this process, today's language models are trained to generate only the final result. As a consequence, they lack several abilities crucial for collaborative writing: They are unable to update existing texts, difficult to control and incapable of verbally planning or explaining their actions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce PEER, a collaborative language model that is trained to imitate the entire writing process itself: PEER can write drafts, add suggestions, propose edits and provide explanations for its actions. Crucially, we train multiple instances of PEER able to infill various parts of the writing process, enabling the use of self-training techniques for increasing the quality, amount and diversity of training data. This unlocks PEER's full potential by making it applicable in domains for which no edit histories are available and improving its ability to follow instructions, to write useful comments, and to explain its actions. We show that PEER achieves strong performance across various domains and editing tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

"That's so cute!": The CARE Dataset for Affective Response Detection

Social media plays an increasing role in our communication with friends and family, and our consumption of information and entertainment. Hence, to design effective ranking functions for posts on social media, it would be useful to predict the affective response to a post (e.g., whether the user is likely to be humored, inspired, angered, informed). Similar to work on emotion recognition (which focuses on the affect of the publisher of the post), the traditional approach to recognizing affective response would involve an expensive investment in human annotation of training data. We introduce CARE$_{db}$, a dataset of 230k social media posts annotated according to 7 affective responses using the Common Affective Response Expression (CARE) method. The CARE method is a means of leveraging the signal that is present in comments that are posted in response to a post, providing high-precision evidence about the affective response of the readers to the post without human annotation. Unlike human annotation, the annotation process we describe here can be iterated upon to expand the coverage of the method, particularly for new affective responses. We present experiments that demonstrate that the CARE annotations compare favorably with crowd-sourced annotations. Finally, we use CARE$_{db}$ to train competitive BERT-based models for predicting affective response as well as emotion detection, demonstrating the utility of the dataset for related tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Improving Wikipedia Verifiability with AI

Verifiability is a core content policy of Wikipedia: claims that are likely to be challenged need to be backed by citations. There are millions of articles available online and thousands of new articles are released each month. For this reason, finding relevant sources is a difficult task: many claims do not have any references that support them. Furthermore, even existing citations might not support a given claim or become obsolete once the original source is updated or deleted. Hence, maintaining and improving the quality of Wikipedia references is an important challenge and there is a pressing need for better tools to assist humans in this effort. Here, we show that the process of improving references can be tackled with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). We develop a neural network based system, called Side, to identify Wikipedia citations that are unlikely to support their claims, and subsequently recommend better ones from the web. We train this model on existing Wikipedia references, therefore learning from the contributions and combined wisdom of thousands of Wikipedia editors. Using crowd-sourcing, we observe that for the top 10% most likely citations to be tagged as unverifiable by our system, humans prefer our system's suggested alternatives compared to the originally cited reference 70% of the time. To validate the applicability of our system, we built a demo to engage with the English-speaking Wikipedia community and find that Side's first citation recommendation collects over 60% more preferences than existing Wikipedia citations for the same top 10% most likely unverifiable claims according to Side. Our results indicate that an AI-based system could be used, in tandem with humans, to improve the verifiability of Wikipedia. More generally, we hope that our work can be used to assist fact checking efforts and increase the general trustworthiness of information online.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Affective Signals in a Social Media Recommender System

People come to social media to satisfy a variety of needs, such as being informed, entertained and inspired, or connected to their friends and community. Hence, to design a ranking function that gives useful and personalized post recommendations, it would be helpful to be able to predict the affective response a user may have to a post (e.g., entertained, informed, angered). This paper describes the challenges and solutions we developed to apply Affective Computing to social media recommendation systems. We address several types of challenges. First, we devise a taxonomy of affects that was small (for practical purposes) yet covers the important nuances needed for the application. Second, to collect training data for our models, we balance between signals that are already available to us (namely, different types of user engagement) and data we collected through a carefully crafted human annotation effort on 800k posts. We demonstrate that affective response information learned from this dataset improves a module in the recommendation system by more than 8%. Online experimentation also demonstrates statistically significant decreases in surfaced violating content and increases in surfaced content that users find valuable.

cs.SI↗