arXiv subjects

Jian-Guang Lou

Publications and source records attributed to Jian-Guang Lou.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

A Parse-Then-Place Approach for Generating Graphic Layouts from Textual Descriptions

Creating layouts is a fundamental step in graphic design. In this work, we propose to use text as the guidance to create graphic layouts, i.e., Text-to-Layout, aiming to lower the design barriers. Text-to-Layout is a challenging task, because it needs to consider the implicit, combined, and incomplete layout constraints from text, each of which has not been studied in previous work. To address this, we present a two-stage approach, named parse-then-place. The approach introduces an intermediate representation (IR) between text and layout to represent diverse layout constraints. With IR, Text-to-Layout is decomposed into a parse stage and a place stage. The parse stage takes a textual description as input and generates an IR, in which the implicit constraints from the text are transformed into explicit ones. The place stage generates layouts based on the IR. To model combined and incomplete constraints, we use a Transformer-based layout generation model and carefully design a way to represent constraints and layouts as sequences. Besides, we adopt the pretrain-then-finetune strategy to boost the performance of the layout generation model with large-scale unlabeled layouts. To evaluate our approach, we construct two Text-to-Layout datasets and conduct experiments on them. Quantitative results, qualitative analysis, and user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

LayoutDiffusion: Improving Graphic Layout Generation by Discrete Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Creating graphic layouts is a fundamental step in graphic designs. In this work, we present a novel generative model named LayoutDiffusion for automatic layout generation. As layout is typically represented as a sequence of discrete tokens, LayoutDiffusion models layout generation as a discrete denoising diffusion process. It learns to reverse a mild forward process, in which layouts become increasingly chaotic with the growth of forward steps and layouts in the neighboring steps do not differ too much. Designing such a mild forward process is however very challenging as layout has both categorical attributes and ordinal attributes. To tackle the challenge, we summarize three critical factors for achieving a mild forward process for the layout, i.e., legality, coordinate proximity and type disruption. Based on the factors, we propose a block-wise transition matrix coupled with a piece-wise linear noise schedule. Experiments on RICO and PubLayNet datasets show that LayoutDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly. Moreover, it enables two conditional layout generation tasks in a plug-and-play manner without re-training and achieves better performance than existing methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?

Compositional generalization--understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives--is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning--the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models--exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Uncovering and Categorizing Social Biases in Text-to-SQL

Content Warning: This work contains examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.} Large pre-trained language models are acknowledged to carry social biases towards different demographics, which can further amplify existing stereotypes in our society and cause even more harm. Text-to-SQL is an important task, models of which are mainly adopted by administrative industries, where unfair decisions may lead to catastrophic consequences. However, existing Text-to-SQL models are trained on clean, neutral datasets, such as Spider and WikiSQL. This, to some extent, cover up social bias in models under ideal conditions, which nevertheless may emerge in real application scenarios. In this work, we aim to uncover and categorize social biases in Text-to-SQL models. We summarize the categories of social biases that may occur in structured data for Text-to-SQL models. We build test benchmarks and reveal that models with similar task accuracy can contain social biases at very different rates. We show how to take advantage of our methodology to uncover and assess social biases in the downstream Text-to-SQL task. We will release our code and data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier

Few-shot learning is a challenging task that requires language models to generalize from limited examples. Large language models like GPT-3 and PaLM have made impressive progress in this area, but they still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K, a benchmark for arithmetic problems. To improve their reasoning skills, previous work has proposed to guide the language model with prompts that elicit a series of reasoning steps before giving the final answer, achieving a significant improvement on GSM8K from 17.9% to 58.1% in problem-solving rate. In this paper, we present DIVERSE (Diverse Verifier on Reasoning Step), a novel approach that further enhances the reasoning capability of language models. DIVERSE has three main components: first, it generates diverse prompts to explore different reasoning paths for the same question; second, it uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme; and third, it verifies each reasoning step individually instead of the whole chain. We evaluate DIVERSE on the latest language model code-davinci-002 and show that it achieves new state-of-the-art results on six of eight reasoning benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K 74.4% to 83.2%).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

TACR: A Table-alignment-based Cell-selection and Reasoning Model for Hybrid Question-Answering

Hybrid Question-Answering (HQA), which targets reasoning over tables and passages linked from table cells, has witnessed significant research in recent years. A common challenge in HQA and other passage-table QA datasets is that it is generally unrealistic to iterate over all table rows, columns, and linked passages to retrieve evidence. Such a challenge made it difficult for previous studies to show their reasoning ability in retrieving answers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Table-alignment-based Cell-selection and Reasoning model (TACR) for hybrid text and table QA, evaluated on the HybridQA and WikiTableQuestions datasets. In evidence retrieval, we design a table-question-alignment enhanced cell-selection method to retrieve fine-grained evidence. In answer reasoning, we incorporate a QA module that treats the row containing selected cells as context. Experimental results over the HybridQA and WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) datasets show that TACR achieves state-of-the-art results on cell selection and outperforms fine-grained evidence retrieval baselines on HybridQA, while achieving competitive performance on WTQ. We also conducted a detailed analysis to demonstrate that being able to align questions to tables in the cell-selection stage can result in important gains from experiments of over 90\% table row and column selection accuracy, meanwhile also improving output explainability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Uncovering and Quantifying Social Biases in Code Generation

With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We propose a new paradigm to construct code prompts and successfully uncover social biases in code generation models. To quantify the severity of social biases in generated code, we develop a dataset along with three metrics to evaluate the overall social bias and fine-grained unfairness across different demographics. Experimental results on three pre-trained code generation models (Codex, InCoder, and CodeGen) with varying sizes, reveal severe social biases. Moreover, we conduct analysis to provide useful insights for further choice of code generation models with low social bias. (This work contains examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.)

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Know What I don't Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unanswerable Questions for Text-to-SQL

The task of text-to-SQL aims to convert a natural language question into its corresponding SQL query within the context of relational tables. Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a "plausible" SQL query for an arbitrary user question, thereby failing to correctly handle problematic user questions. To formalize this problem, we conduct a preliminary study on the observed ambiguous and unanswerable cases in text-to-SQL and summarize them into 6 feature categories. Correspondingly, we identify the causes behind each category and propose requirements for handling ambiguous and unanswerable questions. Following this study, we propose a simple yet effective counterfactual example generation approach that automatically produces ambiguous and unanswerable text-to-SQL examples. Furthermore, we propose a weakly supervised DTE (Detecting-Then-Explaining) model for error detection, localization, and explanation. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best result on both real-world examples and generated examples compared with various baselines. We release our data and code at: \href{https://github.com/wbbeyourself/DTE}{https://github.com/wbbeyourself/DTE}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Large Language Models Meet NL2Code: A Survey

The task of generating code from a natural language description, or NL2Code, is considered a pressing and significant challenge in code intelligence. Thanks to the rapid development of pre-training techniques, surging large language models are being proposed for code, sparking the advances in NL2Code. To facilitate further research and applications in this field, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of 27 existing large language models for NL2Code, and also review benchmarks and metrics. We provide an intuitive comparison of all existing models on the HumanEval benchmark. Through in-depth observation and analysis, we provide some insights and conclude that the key factors contributing to the success of large language models for NL2Code are "Large Size, Premium Data, Expert Tuning". In addition, we discuss challenges and opportunities regarding the gap between models and humans. We also create a website https://nl2code.github.io to track the latest progress through crowd-sourcing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey of large language models for NL2Code, and we believe it will contribute to the ongoing development of the field.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Explainable Automated Debugging via Large Language Model-driven Scientific Debugging

Automated debugging techniques have the potential to reduce developer effort in debugging, and have matured enough to be adopted by industry. However, one critical issue with existing techniques is that, while developers want rationales for the provided automatic debugging results, existing techniques are ill-suited to provide them, as their deduction process differs significantly from that of human developers. Inspired by the way developers interact with code when debugging, we propose Automated Scientific Debugging (AutoSD), a technique that given buggy code and a bug-revealing test, prompts large language models to automatically generate hypotheses, uses debuggers to actively interact with buggy code, and thus automatically reach conclusions prior to patch generation. By aligning the reasoning of automated debugging more closely with that of human developers, we aim to produce intelligible explanations of how a specific patch has been generated, with the hope that the explanation will lead to more efficient and accurate developer decisions. Our empirical analysis on three program repair benchmarks shows that AutoSD performs competitively with other program repair baselines, and that it can indicate when it is confident in its results. Furthermore, we perform a human study with 20 participants, including six professional developers, to evaluate the utility of explanations from AutoSD. Participants with access to explanations could judge patch correctness in roughly the same time as those without, but their accuracy improved for five out of six real-world bugs studied: 70% of participants answered that they wanted explanations when using repair tools, while 55% answered that they were satisfied with the Scientific Debugging presentation.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

LayoutFormer++: Conditional Graphic Layout Generation via Constraint Serialization and Decoding Space Restriction

Conditional graphic layout generation, which generates realistic layouts according to user constraints, is a challenging task that has not been well-studied yet. First, there is limited discussion about how to handle diverse user constraints flexibly and uniformly. Second, to make the layouts conform to user constraints, existing work often sacrifices generation quality significantly. In this work, we propose LayoutFormer++ to tackle the above problems. First, to flexibly handle diverse constraints, we propose a constraint serialization scheme, which represents different user constraints as sequences of tokens with a predefined format. Then, we formulate conditional layout generation as a sequence-to-sequence transformation, and leverage encoder-decoder framework with Transformer as the basic architecture. Furthermore, to make the layout better meet user requirements without harming quality, we propose a decoding space restriction strategy. Specifically, we prune the predicted distribution by ignoring the options that definitely violate user constraints and likely result in low-quality layouts, and make the model samples from the restricted distribution. Experiments demonstrate that LayoutFormer++ outperforms existing approaches on all the tasks in terms of both better generation quality and less constraint violation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Does Deep Learning Learn to Abstract? A Systematic Probing Framework

Abstraction is a desirable capability for deep learning models, which means to induce abstract concepts from concrete instances and flexibly apply them beyond the learning context. At the same time, there is a lack of clear understanding about both the presence and further characteristics of this capability in deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce a systematic probing framework to explore the abstraction capability of deep learning models from a transferability perspective. A set of controlled experiments are conducted based on this framework, providing strong evidence that two probed pre-trained language models (PLMs), T5 and GPT2, have the abstraction capability. We also conduct in-depth analysis, thus shedding further light: (1) the whole training phase exhibits a "memorize-then-abstract" two-stage process; (2) the learned abstract concepts are gathered in a few middle-layer attention heads, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the model; (3) the probed abstraction capabilities exhibit robustness against concept mutations, and are more robust to low-level/source-side mutations than high-level/target-side ones; (4) generic pre-training is critical to the emergence of abstraction capability, and PLMs exhibit better abstraction with larger model sizes and data scales.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Towards Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Formulaic Knowledge

In this paper, we study the problem of knowledge-intensive text-to-SQL, in which domain knowledge is necessary to parse expert questions into SQL queries over domain-specific tables. We formalize this scenario by building a new Chinese benchmark KnowSQL consisting of domain-specific questions covering various domains. We then address this problem by presenting formulaic knowledge, rather than by annotating additional data examples. More concretely, we construct a formulaic knowledge bank as a domain knowledge base and propose a framework (ReGrouP) to leverage this formulaic knowledge during parsing. Experiments using ReGrouP demonstrate a significant 28.2% improvement overall on KnowSQL.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models Against Natural and Realistic Adversarial Table Perturbation

The robustness of Text-to-SQL parsers against adversarial perturbations plays a crucial role in delivering highly reliable applications. Previous studies along this line primarily focused on perturbations in the natural language question side, neglecting the variability of tables. Motivated by this, we propose the Adversarial Table Perturbation (ATP) as a new attacking paradigm to measure the robustness of Text-to-SQL models. Following this proposition, we curate ADVETA, the first robustness evaluation benchmark featuring natural and realistic ATPs. All tested state-of-the-art models experience dramatic performance drops on ADVETA, revealing models' vulnerability in real-world practices. To defend against ATP, we build a systematic adversarial training example generation framework tailored for better contextualization of tabular data. Experiments show that our approach not only brings the best robustness improvement against table-side perturbations but also substantially empowers models against NL-side perturbations. We release our benchmark and code at: https://github.com/microsoft/ContextualSP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

LogiGAN: Learning Logical Reasoning via Adversarial Pre-training

We present LogiGAN, an unsupervised adversarial pre-training framework for improving logical reasoning abilities of language models. Upon automatic identifying logical reasoning phenomena in massive text corpus via detection heuristics, we train language models to predict the masked-out logical statements. Inspired by the facilitation effect of reflective thinking in human learning, we analogically simulate the learning-thinking process with an adversarial Generator-Verifier architecture to assist logic learning. LogiGAN implements a novel sequential GAN approach that (a) circumvents the non-differentiable challenge of the sequential GAN by leveraging the Generator as a sentence-level generative likelihood scorer with a learning objective of reaching scoring consensus with the Verifier; (b) is computationally feasible for large-scale pre-training with arbitrary target length. Both base and large size language models pre-trained with LogiGAN demonstrate obvious performance improvement on 12 datasets requiring general reasoning abilities, revealing the fundamental role of logic in broad reasoning, as well as the effectiveness of LogiGAN. Ablation studies on LogiGAN components reveal the relative orthogonality between linguistic and logic abilities and suggest that reflective thinking's facilitation effect might also generalize to machine learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

CodeT: Code Generation with Generated Tests

The task of generating code solutions for a given programming problem can benefit from the use of pre-trained language models such as Codex, which can produce multiple diverse samples. However, a major challenge for this task is to select the most appropriate solution from the multiple samples generated by the pre-trained language models. A natural way to evaluate the quality and correctness of a code solution is to run it against a set of test cases, but the manual creation of such test cases is often costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel method, CodeT, that leverages the same pre-trained language models to automatically generate test cases for the code samples, thus reducing the human effort and increasing the coverage of the test scenarios. CodeT then executes the code samples using the generated test cases, and performs a dual execution agreement, which considers both the consistency of the outputs against the generated test cases and the agreement of the outputs with other code samples. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks, HumanEval, MBPP, APPS and CodeContests, using five different pre-trained language models with varying sizes and capabilities. Our results show that CodeT can significantly improve the performance of code solution selection over previous methods, achieving remarkable and consistent gains across different models and benchmarks. For instance, CodeT improves the pass@1 metric on HumanEval to 65.8%, which represents an absolute improvement of 18.8% over the code-davinci-002 model, and an absolute improvement of more than 20% over the previous state-of-the-art results.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

When Language Model Meets Private Library

With the rapid development of pre-training techniques, a number of language models have been pre-trained on large-scale code corpora and perform well in code generation. In this paper, we investigate how to equip pre-trained language models with the ability of code generation for private libraries. In practice, it is common for programmers to write code using private libraries. However, this is a challenge for language models since they have never seen private APIs during training. Motivated by the fact that private libraries usually come with elaborate API documentation, we propose a novel framework with two modules: the APIRetriever finds useful APIs, and then the APICoder generates code using these APIs. For APIRetriever, we present a dense retrieval system and also design a friendly interaction to involve uses. For APICoder, we can directly use off-the-shelf language models, or continually pre-train the base model on a code corpus containing API information. Both modules are trained with data from public libraries and can be generalized to private ones. Furthermore, we craft three benchmarks for private libraries, named TorchDataEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval. Experimental results demonstrate the impressive performance of our framework.

cs.PL↗