arXiv subjects

Minghui Qiu

Publications and source records attributed to Minghui Qiu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling

Canonical automatic summary evaluation metrics, such as ROUGE, focus on lexical similarity which cannot well capture semantics nor linguistic quality and require a reference summary which is costly to obtain. Recently, there have been a growing number of efforts to alleviate either or both of the two drawbacks. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept study to a weakly supervised summary evaluation approach without the presence of reference summaries. Massive data in existing summarization datasets are transformed for training by pairing documents with corrupted reference summaries. In cross-domain tests, our strategy outperforms baselines with promising improvements, and show a great advantage in gauging linguistic qualities over all metrics.

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arXiv2022

Multi-level Cross-view Contrastive Learning for Knowledge-aware Recommender System

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role in recommender systems. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) based model has gradually become the theme of knowledge-aware recommendation (KGR). However, there is a natural deficiency for GNN-based KGR models, that is, the sparse supervised signal problem, which may make their actual performance drop to some extent. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in mining supervised signals from data itself, in this paper, we focus on exploring the contrastive learning in KG-aware recommendation and propose a novel multi-level cross-view contrastive learning mechanism, named MCCLK. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods which generate two graph views by uniform data augmentation schemes such as corruption or dropping, we comprehensively consider three different graph views for KG-aware recommendation, including global-level structural view, local-level collaborative and semantic views. Specifically, we consider the user-item graph as a collaborative view, the item-entity graph as a semantic view, and the user-item-entity graph as a structural view. MCCLK hence performs contrastive learning across three views on both local and global levels, mining comprehensive graph feature and structure information in a self-supervised manner. Besides, in semantic view, a k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) item-item semantic graph construction module is proposed, to capture the important item-item semantic relation which is usually ignored by previous work. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. The implementations are available at: https://github.com/CCIIPLab/MCCLK.

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arXiv2022

Making Pre-trained Language Models End-to-end Few-shot Learners with Contrastive Prompt Tuning

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance for various language understanding tasks in IR systems, which require the fine-tuning process based on labeled training data. For low-resource scenarios, prompt-based learning for PLMs exploits prompts as task guidance and turns downstream tasks into masked language problems for effective few-shot fine-tuning. In most existing approaches, the high performance of prompt-based learning heavily relies on handcrafted prompts and verbalizers, which may limit the application of such approaches in real-world scenarios. To solve this issue, we present CP-Tuning, the first end-to-end Contrastive Prompt Tuning framework for fine-tuning PLMs without any manual engineering of task-specific prompts and verbalizers. It is integrated with the task-invariant continuous prompt encoding technique with fully trainable prompt parameters. We further propose the pair-wise cost-sensitive contrastive learning procedure to optimize the model in order to achieve verbalizer-free class mapping and enhance the task-invariance of prompts. It explicitly learns to distinguish different classes and makes the decision boundary smoother by assigning different costs to easy and hard cases. Experiments over a variety of language understanding tasks used in IR systems and different PLMs show that CP-Tuning outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2021

HRKD: Hierarchical Relational Knowledge Distillation for Cross-domain Language Model Compression

On many natural language processing tasks, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown overwhelming performances compared with traditional neural network methods. Nevertheless, their huge model size and low inference speed have hindered the deployment on resource-limited devices in practice. In this paper, we target to compress PLMs with knowledge distillation, and propose a hierarchical relational knowledge distillation (HRKD) method to capture both hierarchical and domain relational information. Specifically, to enhance the model capability and transferability, we leverage the idea of meta-learning and set up domain-relational graphs to capture the relational information across different domains. And to dynamically select the most representative prototypes for each domain, we propose a hierarchical compare-aggregate mechanism to capture hierarchical relationships. Extensive experiments on public multi-domain datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our HRKD method as well as its strong few-shot learning ability. For reproducibility, we release the code at https://github.com/cheneydon/hrkd.

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arXiv2021

Knowledge-Empowered Representation Learning for Chinese Medical Reading Comprehension: Task, Model and Resources

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) aims to extract answers to questions given a passage. It has been widely studied recently, especially in open domains. However, few efforts have been made on closed-domain MRC, mainly due to the lack of large-scale training data. In this paper, we introduce a multi-target MRC task for the medical domain, whose goal is to predict answers to medical questions and the corresponding support sentences from medical information sources simultaneously, in order to ensure the high reliability of medical knowledge serving. A high-quality dataset is manually constructed for the purpose, named Multi-task Chinese Medical MRC dataset (CMedMRC), with detailed analysis conducted. We further propose the Chinese medical BERT model for the task (CMedBERT), which fuses medical knowledge into pre-trained language models by the dynamic fusion mechanism of heterogeneous features and the multi-task learning strategy. Experiments show that CMedBERT consistently outperforms strong baselines by fusing context-aware and knowledge-aware token representations.

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arXiv2021

EasyTransfer -- A Simple and Scalable Deep Transfer Learning Platform for NLP Applications

The literature has witnessed the success of leveraging Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Transfer Learning (TL) algorithms to a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, yet it is not easy to build an easy-to-use and scalable TL toolkit for this purpose. To bridge this gap, the EasyTransfer platform is designed to develop deep TL algorithms for NLP applications. EasyTransfer is backended with a high-performance and scalable engine for efficient training and inference, and also integrates comprehensive deep TL algorithms, to make the development of industrial-scale TL applications easier. In EasyTransfer, the built-in data and model parallelism strategies, combined with AI compiler optimization, show to be 4.0x faster than the community version of distributed training. EasyTransfer supports various NLP models in the ModelZoo, including mainstream PLMs and multi-modality models. It also features various in-house developed TL algorithms, together with the AppZoo for NLP applications. The toolkit is convenient for users to quickly start model training, evaluation, and online deployment. EasyTransfer is currently deployed at Alibaba to support a variety of business scenarios, including item recommendation, personalized search, conversational question answering, etc. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets and online applications show that EasyTransfer is suitable for online production with cutting-edge performance for various applications. The source code of EasyTransfer is released at Github (https://github.com/alibaba/EasyTransfer).

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arXiv2021

SMedBERT: A Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Model with Structured Semantics for Medical Text Mining

Recently, the performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) has been significantly improved by injecting knowledge facts to enhance their abilities of language understanding. For medical domains, the background knowledge sources are especially useful, due to the massive medical terms and their complicated relations are difficult to understand in text. In this work, we introduce SMedBERT, a medical PLM trained on large-scale medical corpora, incorporating deep structured semantic knowledge from neighbors of linked-entity.In SMedBERT, the mention-neighbor hybrid attention is proposed to learn heterogeneous-entity information, which infuses the semantic representations of entity types into the homogeneous neighboring entity structure. Apart from knowledge integration as external features, we propose to employ the neighbors of linked-entities in the knowledge graph as additional global contexts of text mentions, allowing them to communicate via shared neighbors, thus enrich their semantic representations. Experiments demonstrate that SMedBERT significantly outperforms strong baselines in various knowledge-intensive Chinese medical tasks. It also improves the performance of other tasks such as question answering, question matching and natural language inference.

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arXiv2021

Meta-Learning Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Few-Shot Text Classification

Meta-learning has emerged as a trending technique to tackle few-shot text classification and achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, existing solutions heavily rely on the exploitation of lexical features and their distributional signatures on training data, while neglecting to strengthen the model's ability to adapt to new tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning framework integrated with an adversarial domain adaptation network, aiming to improve the adaptive ability of the model and generate high-quality text embedding for new classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets and our method demonstrates clear superiority over the state-of-the-art models in all the datasets. In particular, the accuracy of 1-shot and 5-shot classification on the dataset of 20 Newsgroups is boosted from 52.1% to 59.6%, and from 68.3% to 77.8%, respectively.

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arXiv2021

Learning to Augment for Data-Scarce Domain BERT Knowledge Distillation

Despite pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved appealing performance in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, they are computationally expensive to be deployed in real-time applications. A typical method is to adopt knowledge distillation to compress these large pre-trained models (teacher models) to small student models. However, for a target domain with scarce training data, the teacher can hardly pass useful knowledge to the student, which yields performance degradation for the student models. To tackle this problem, we propose a method to learn to augment for data-scarce domain BERT knowledge distillation, by learning a cross-domain manipulation scheme that automatically augments the target with the help of resource-rich source domains. Specifically, the proposed method generates samples acquired from a stationary distribution near the target data and adopts a reinforced selector to automatically refine the augmentation strategy according to the performance of the student. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four different tasks, and for the data-scarce domains, the compressed student models even perform better than the original large teacher model, with much fewer parameters (only ${\sim}13.3\%$) when only a few labeled examples available.

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arXiv2021

Global Context Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) is a challenging task, which aims at recommending items based on anonymous behavior sequences. Almost all the existing solutions for SBR model user preference only based on the current session without exploiting the other sessions, which may contain both relevant and irrelevant item-transitions to the current session. This paper proposes a novel approach, called Global Context Enhanced Graph Neural Networks (GCE-GNN) to exploit item transitions over all sessions in a more subtle manner for better inferring the user preference of the current session. Specifically, GCE-GNN learns two levels of item embeddings from session graph and global graph, respectively: (i) Session graph, which is to learn the session-level item embedding by modeling pairwise item-transitions within the current session; and (ii) Global graph, which is to learn the global-level item embedding by modeling pairwise item-transitions over all sessions. In GCE-GNN, we propose a novel global-level item representation learning layer, which employs a session-aware attention mechanism to recursively incorporate the neighbors' embeddings of each node on the global graph. We also design a session-level item representation learning layer, which employs a GNN on the session graph to learn session-level item embeddings within the current session. Moreover, GCE-GNN aggregates the learnt item representations in the two levels with a soft attention mechanism. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that GCE-GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

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arXiv2021

Exploring Global Information for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) is a challenging task, which aims at recommending items based on anonymous behavior sequences. Most existing SBR studies model the user preferences based only on the current session while neglecting the item-transition information from the other sessions, which suffer from the inability of modeling the complicated item-transition pattern. To address the limitations, we introduce global item-transition information to strength the modeling of the dynamic item-transition. For fully exploiting the global item-transition information, two ways of exploring global information for SBR are studied in this work. Specifically, we first propose a basic GNN-based framework (BGNN), which solely uses session-level item-transition information on session graph. Based on BGNN, we propose a novel approach, called Session-based Recommendation with Global Information (SRGI), which infers the user preferences via fully exploring global item-transitions over all sessions from two different perspectives: (i) Fusion-based Model (SRGI-FM), which recursively incorporates the neighbor embeddings of each node on global graph into the learning process of session level item representation; and (ii) Constrained-based Model (SRGI-CM), which treats the global-level item-transition information as a constraint to ensure the learned item embeddings are consistent with the global item-transition. Extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that both SRGI-FM and SRGI-CM outperform the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

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arXiv2021

Kaleido-BERT: Vision-Language Pre-training on Fashion Domain

We present a new vision-language (VL) pre-training model dubbed Kaleido-BERT, which introduces a novel kaleido strategy for fashion cross-modality representations from transformers. In contrast to random masking strategy of recent VL models, we design alignment guided masking to jointly focus more on image-text semantic relations. To this end, we carry out five novel tasks, i.e., rotation, jigsaw, camouflage, grey-to-color, and blank-to-color for self-supervised VL pre-training at patches of different scale. Kaleido-BERT is conceptually simple and easy to extend to the existing BERT framework, it attains new state-of-the-art results by large margins on four downstream tasks, including text retrieval (R@1: 4.03% absolute improvement), image retrieval (R@1: 7.13% abs imv.), category recognition (ACC: 3.28% abs imv.), and fashion captioning (Bleu4: 1.2 abs imv.). We validate the efficiency of Kaleido-BERT on a wide range of e-commerical websites, demonstrating its broader potential in real-world applications.

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arXiv2021

AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown their effectiveness in various natural language processing tasks. However, the huge parameter size makes them difficult to be deployed in real-time applications that require quick inference with limited resources. Existing methods compress BERT into small models while such compression is task-independent, i.e., the same compressed BERT for all different downstream tasks. Motivated by the necessity and benefits of task-oriented BERT compression, we propose a novel compression method, AdaBERT, that leverages differentiable Neural Architecture Search to automatically compress BERT into task-adaptive small models for specific tasks. We incorporate a task-oriented knowledge distillation loss to provide search hints and an efficiency-aware loss as search constraints, which enables a good trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness for task-adaptive BERT compression. We evaluate AdaBERT on several NLP tasks, and the results demonstrate that those task-adaptive compressed models are 12.7x to 29.3x faster than BERT in inference time and 11.5x to 17.0x smaller in terms of parameter size, while comparable performance is maintained.

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arXiv2020

KEML: A Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning Framework for Lexical Relation Classification

Lexical relations describe how concepts are semantically related, in the form of relation triples. The accurate prediction of lexical relations between concepts is challenging, due to the sparsity of patterns indicating the existence of such relations. We propose the Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning (KEML) framework to address the task of lexical relation classification. In KEML, the LKB-BERT (Lexical Knowledge Base-BERT) model is presented to learn concept representations from massive text corpora, with rich lexical knowledge injected by distant supervision. A probabilistic distribution of auxiliary tasks is defined to increase the model's ability to recognize different types of lexical relations. We further combine a meta-learning process over the auxiliary task distribution and supervised learning to train the neural lexical relation classifier. Experiments over multiple datasets show that KEML outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Meta Fine-Tuning Neural Language Models for Multi-Domain Text Mining

Pre-trained neural language models bring significant improvement for various NLP tasks, by fine-tuning the models on task-specific training sets. During fine-tuning, the parameters are initialized from pre-trained models directly, which ignores how the learning process of similar NLP tasks in different domains is correlated and mutually reinforced. In this paper, we propose an effective learning procedure named Meta Fine-Tuning (MFT), served as a meta-learner to solve a group of similar NLP tasks for neural language models. Instead of simply multi-task training over all the datasets, MFT only learns from typical instances of various domains to acquire highly transferable knowledge. It further encourages the language model to encode domain-invariant representations by optimizing a series of novel domain corruption loss functions. After MFT, the model can be fine-tuned for each domain with better parameter initializations and higher generalization ability. We implement MFT upon BERT to solve several multi-domain text mining tasks. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of MFT and its usefulness for few-shot learning.

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arXiv2020

One-shot Text Field Labeling using Attention and Belief Propagation for Structure Information Extraction

Structured information extraction from document images usually consists of three steps: text detection, text recognition, and text field labeling. While text detection and text recognition have been heavily studied and improved a lot in literature, text field labeling is less explored and still faces many challenges. Existing learning based methods for text labeling task usually require a large amount of labeled examples to train a specific model for each type of document. However, collecting large amounts of document images and labeling them is difficult and sometimes impossible due to privacy issues. Deploying separate models for each type of document also consumes a lot of resources. Facing these challenges, we explore one-shot learning for the text field labeling task. Existing one-shot learning methods for the task are mostly rule-based and have difficulty in labeling fields in crowded regions with few landmarks and fields consisting of multiple separate text regions. To alleviate these problems, we proposed a novel deep end-to-end trainable approach for one-shot text field labeling, which makes use of attention mechanism to transfer the layout information between document images. We further applied conditional random field on the transferred layout information for the refinement of field labeling. We collected and annotated a real-world one-shot field labeling dataset with a large variety of document types and conducted extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model. To stimulate research in this direction, the collected dataset and the one-shot model will be released1.

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arXiv2020

A Comprehensive Analysis of Information Leakage in Deep Transfer Learning

Transfer learning is widely used for transferring knowledge from a source domain to the target domain where the labeled data is scarce. Recently, deep transfer learning has achieved remarkable progress in various applications. However, the source and target datasets usually belong to two different organizations in many real-world scenarios, potential privacy issues in deep transfer learning are posed. In this study, to thoroughly analyze the potential privacy leakage in deep transfer learning, we first divide previous methods into three categories. Based on that, we demonstrate specific threats that lead to unintentional privacy leakage in each category. Additionally, we also provide some solutions to prevent these threats. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to provide a thorough analysis of the information leakage issues in deep transfer learning methods and provide potential solutions to the issue. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and an industry dataset are conducted to show the privacy leakage under different deep transfer learning settings and defense solution effectiveness.

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arXiv2020

FashionBERT: Text and Image Matching with Adaptive Loss for Cross-modal Retrieval

In this paper, we address the text and image matching in cross-modal retrieval of the fashion industry. Different from the matching in the general domain, the fashion matching is required to pay much more attention to the fine-grained information in the fashion images and texts. Pioneer approaches detect the region of interests (i.e., RoIs) from images and use the RoI embeddings as image representations. In general, RoIs tend to represent the "object-level" information in the fashion images, while fashion texts are prone to describe more detailed information, e.g. styles, attributes. RoIs are thus not fine-grained enough for fashion text and image matching. To this end, we propose FashionBERT, which leverages patches as image features. With the pre-trained BERT model as the backbone network, FashionBERT learns high level representations of texts and images. Meanwhile, we propose an adaptive loss to trade off multitask learning in the FashionBERT modeling. Two tasks (i.e., text and image matching and cross-modal retrieval) are incorporated to evaluate FashionBERT. On the public dataset, experiments demonstrate FashionBERT achieves significant improvements in performances than the baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. In practice, FashionBERT is applied in a concrete cross-modal retrieval application. We provide the detailed matching performance and inference efficiency analysis.

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