arXiv subjects

Zi-Yi Dou

Publications and source records attributed to Zi-Yi Dou.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

An Empirical Study of Training End-to-End Vision-and-Language Transformers

Vision-and-language (VL) pre-training has proven to be highly effective on various VL downstream tasks. While recent work has shown that fully transformer-based VL models can be more efficient than previous region-feature-based methods, their performance on downstream tasks often degrades significantly. In this paper, we present METER, a Multimodal End-to-end TransformER framework, through which we investigate how to design and pre-train a fully transformer-based VL model in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we dissect the model designs along multiple dimensions: vision encoders (e.g., CLIP-ViT, Swin transformer), text encoders (e.g., RoBERTa, DeBERTa), multimodal fusion module (e.g., merged attention vs. co-attention), architectural design (e.g., encoder-only vs. encoder-decoder), and pre-training objectives (e.g., masked image modeling). We conduct comprehensive experiments and provide insights on how to train a performant VL transformer. METER achieves an accuracy of 77.64% on the VQAv2 test-std set using only 4M images for pre-training, surpassing the state-of-the-art region-feature-based model by 1.04%, and outperforming the previous best fully transformer-based model by 1.6%. Notably, when further scaled up, our best VQA model achieves an accuracy of 80.54%. Code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/zdou0830/METER.

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arXiv2022

Zero-shot Commonsense Question Answering with Cloze Translation and Consistency Optimization

Commonsense question answering (CQA) aims to test if models can answer questions regarding commonsense knowledge that everyone knows. Prior works that incorporate external knowledge bases have shown promising results, but knowledge bases are expensive to construct and are often limited to a fixed set of relations. In this paper, we instead focus on better utilizing the \textit{implicit knowledge} stored in pre-trained language models. While researchers have found that the knowledge embedded in pre-trained language models can be extracted by having them fill in the blanks of carefully designed prompts for relation extraction and text classification, it remains unclear if we can adopt this paradigm in CQA where the inputs and outputs take much more flexible forms. To this end, we investigate four translation methods that can translate natural questions into cloze-style sentences to better solicit commonsense knowledge from language models, including a syntactic-based model, an unsupervised neural model, and two supervised neural models. In addition, to combine the different translation methods, we propose to encourage consistency among model predictions on different translated questions with unlabeled data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on three CQA datasets in zero-shot settings. We show that our methods are complementary to a knowledge base improved model, and combining them can lead to state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Analyses also reveal distinct characteristics of the different cloze translation methods and provide insights on why combining them can lead to great improvements.

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arXiv2021

Word Alignment by Fine-tuning Embeddings on Parallel Corpora

Word alignment over parallel corpora has a wide variety of applications, including learning translation lexicons, cross-lingual transfer of language processing tools, and automatic evaluation or analysis of translation outputs. The great majority of past work on word alignment has worked by performing unsupervised learning on parallel texts. Recently, however, other work has demonstrated that pre-trained contextualized word embeddings derived from multilingually trained language models (LMs) prove an attractive alternative, achieving competitive results on the word alignment task even in the absence of explicit training on parallel data. In this paper, we examine methods to marry the two approaches: leveraging pre-trained LMs but fine-tuning them on parallel text with objectives designed to improve alignment quality, and proposing methods to effectively extract alignments from these fine-tuned models. We perform experiments on five language pairs and demonstrate that our model can consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art models of all varieties. In addition, we demonstrate that we are able to train multilingual word aligners that can obtain robust performance on different language pairs. Our aligner, AWESOME (Aligning Word Embedding Spaces of Multilingual Encoders), with pre-trained models is available at https://github.com/neulab/awesome-align

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arXiv2021

ExplainaBoard: An Explainable Leaderboard for NLP

With the rapid development of NLP research, leaderboards have emerged as one tool to track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks. They are effective in this goal to some extent, but generally present a rather simplistic one-dimensional view of the submitted systems, communicated only through holistic accuracy numbers. In this paper, we present a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation: the ExplainaBoard, which in addition to inheriting the functionality of the standard leaderboard, also allows researchers to (i) diagnose strengths and weaknesses of a single system (e.g.~what is the best-performing system bad at?) (ii) interpret relationships between multiple systems. (e.g.~where does system A outperform system B? What if we combine systems A, B, and C?) and (iii) examine prediction results closely (e.g.~what are common errors made by multiple systems, or in what contexts do particular errors occur?). So far, ExplainaBoard covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks. ExplainaBoard keeps updated and is recently upgraded by supporting (1) multilingual multi-task benchmark, (2) meta-evaluation, and (3) more complicated task: machine translation, which reviewers also suggested.} We not only released an online platform on the website \url{http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/} but also make our evaluation tool an API with MIT Licence at Github \url{https://github.com/neulab/explainaBoard} and PyPi \url{https://pypi.org/project/interpret-eval/} that allows users to conveniently assess their models offline. We additionally release all output files from systems that we have run or collected to motivate "output-driven" research in the future.

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arXiv2021

GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarization

Neural abstractive summarization models are flexible and can produce coherent summaries, but they are sometimes unfaithful and can be difficult to control. While previous studies attempt to provide different types of guidance to control the output and increase faithfulness, it is not clear how these strategies compare and contrast to each other. In this paper, we propose a general and extensible guided summarization framework (GSum) that can effectively take different kinds of external guidance as input, and we perform experiments across several different varieties. Experiments demonstrate that this model is effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance according to ROUGE on 4 popular summarization datasets when using highlighted sentences as guidance. In addition, we show that our guided model can generate more faithful summaries and demonstrate how different types of guidance generate qualitatively different summaries, lending a degree of controllability to the learned models.

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arXiv2021

RefSum: Refactoring Neural Summarization

Although some recent works show potential complementarity among different state-of-the-art systems, few works try to investigate this problem in text summarization. Researchers in other areas commonly refer to the techniques of reranking or stacking to approach this problem. In this work, we highlight several limitations of previous methods, which motivates us to present a new framework Refactor that provides a unified view of text summarization and summaries combination. Experimentally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation that involves twenty-two base systems, four datasets, and three different application scenarios. Besides new state-of-the-art results on CNN/DailyMail dataset (46.18 ROUGE-1), we also elaborate on how our proposed method addresses the limitations of the traditional methods and the effectiveness of the Refactor model sheds light on insight for performance improvement. Our system can be directly used by other researchers as an off-the-shelf tool to achieve further performance improvements. We open-source all the code and provide a convenient interface to use it: https://github.com/yixinL7/Refactoring-Summarization. We have also made the demo of this work available at: http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/leaderboard/task-summ/index.php.

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arXiv2020

CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems

Neural network-based models augmented with unsupervised pre-trained knowledge have achieved impressive performance on text summarization. However, most existing evaluation methods are limited to an in-domain setting, where summarizers are trained and evaluated on the same dataset. We argue that this approach can narrow our understanding of the generalization ability for different summarization systems. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of characteristics of different datasets and investigate the performance of different summarization models under a cross-dataset setting, in which a summarizer trained on one corpus will be evaluated on a range of out-of-domain corpora. A comprehensive study of 11 representative summarization systems on 5 datasets from different domains reveals the effect of model architectures and generation ways (i.e. abstractive and extractive) on model generalization ability. Further, experimental results shed light on the limitations of existing summarizers. Brief introduction and supplementary code can be found in https://github.com/zide05/CDEvalSumm.

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arXiv2020

Dynamic Data Selection and Weighting for Iterative Back-Translation

Back-translation has proven to be an effective method to utilize monolingual data in neural machine translation (NMT), and iteratively conducting back-translation can further improve the model performance. Selecting which monolingual data to back-translate is crucial, as we require that the resulting synthetic data are of high quality and reflect the target domain. To achieve these two goals, data selection and weighting strategies have been proposed, with a common practice being to select samples close to the target domain but also dissimilar to the average general-domain text. In this paper, we provide insights into this commonly used approach and generalize it to a dynamic curriculum learning strategy, which is applied to iterative back-translation models. In addition, we propose weighting strategies based on both the current quality of the sentence and its improvement over the previous iteration. We evaluate our models on domain adaptation, low-resource, and high-resource MT settings and on two language pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods achieve improvements of up to 1.8 BLEU points over competitive baselines.

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arXiv2020

TICO-19: the Translation Initiative for Covid-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is the worst pandemic to strike the world in over a century. Crucial to stemming the tide of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is communicating to vulnerable populations the means by which they can protect themselves. To this end, the collaborators forming the Translation Initiative for COvid-19 (TICO-19) have made test and development data available to AI and MT researchers in 35 different languages in order to foster the development of tools and resources for improving access to information about COVID-19 in these languages. In addition to 9 high-resourced, "pivot" languages, the team is targeting 26 lesser resourced languages, in particular languages of Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia, whose populations may be the most vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The same data is translated into all of the languages represented, meaning that testing or development can be done for any pairing of languages in the set. Further, the team is converting the test and development data into translation memories (TMXs) that can be used by localizers from and to any of the languages.

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arXiv2020

A Deep Reinforced Model for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Summarization with Bilingual Semantic Similarity Rewards

Cross-lingual text summarization aims at generating a document summary in one language given input in another language. It is a practically important but under-explored task, primarily due to the dearth of available data. Existing methods resort to machine translation to synthesize training data, but such pipeline approaches suffer from error propagation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end cross-lingual text summarization model. The model uses reinforcement learning to directly optimize a bilingual semantic similarity metric between the summaries generated in a target language and gold summaries in a source language. We also introduce techniques to pre-train the model leveraging monolingual summarization and machine translation objectives. Experimental results in both English--Chinese and English--German cross-lingual summarization settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. In addition, we find that reinforcement learning models with bilingual semantic similarity as rewards generate more fluent sentences than strong baselines.

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arXiv2019

Domain Differential Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation

Neural networks are known to be data hungry and domain sensitive, but it is nearly impossible to obtain large quantities of labeled data for every domain we are interested in. This necessitates the use of domain adaptation strategies. One common strategy encourages generalization by aligning the global distribution statistics between source and target domains, but one drawback is that the statistics of different domains or tasks are inherently divergent, and smoothing over these differences can lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose the framework of {\it Domain Differential Adaptation (DDA)}, where instead of smoothing over these differences we embrace them, directly modeling the difference between domains using models in a related task. We then use these learned domain differentials to adapt models for the target task accordingly. Experimental results on domain adaptation for neural machine translation demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy, achieving consistent improvements over other alternative adaptation strategies in multiple experimental settings.

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arXiv2019

compare-mt: A Tool for Holistic Comparison of Language Generation Systems

In this paper, we describe compare-mt, a tool for holistic analysis and comparison of the results of systems for language generation tasks such as machine translation. The main goal of the tool is to give the user a high-level and coherent view of the salient differences between systems that can then be used to guide further analysis or system improvement. It implements a number of tools to do so, such as analysis of accuracy of generation of particular types of words, bucketed histograms of sentence accuracies or counts based on salient characteristics, and extraction of characteristic $n$-grams for each system. It also has a number of advanced features such as use of linguistic labels, source side data, or comparison of log likelihoods for probabilistic models, and also aims to be easily extensible by users to new types of analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/neulab/compare-mt

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arXiv2019

Investigating Meta-Learning Algorithms for Low-Resource Natural Language Understanding Tasks

Learning general representations of text is a fundamental problem for many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Previously, researchers have proposed to use language model pre-training and multi-task learning to learn robust representations. However, these methods can achieve sub-optimal performance in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by the recent success of optimization-based meta-learning algorithms, in this paper, we explore the model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) and its variants for low-resource NLU tasks. We validate our methods on the GLUE benchmark and show that our proposed models can outperform several strong baselines. We further empirically demonstrate that the learned representations can be adapted to new tasks efficiently and effectively.

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arXiv2019

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation with Domain-Aware Feature Embeddings

The recent success of neural machine translation models relies on the availability of high quality, in-domain data. Domain adaptation is required when domain-specific data is scarce or nonexistent. Previous unsupervised domain adaptation strategies include training the model with in-domain copied monolingual or back-translated data. However, these methods use generic representations for text regardless of domain shift, which makes it infeasible for translation models to control outputs conditional on a specific domain. In this work, we propose an approach that adapts models with domain-aware feature embeddings, which are learned via an auxiliary language modeling task. Our approach allows the model to assign domain-specific representations to words and output sentences in the desired domain. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, achieving consistent improvements in multiple experimental settings. In addition, we show that combining our method with back translation can further improve the performance of the model.

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arXiv2019

Information Aggregation for Multi-Head Attention with Routing-by-Agreement

Multi-head attention is appealing for its ability to jointly extract different types of information from multiple representation subspaces. Concerning the information aggregation, a common practice is to use a concatenation followed by a linear transformation, which may not fully exploit the expressiveness of multi-head attention. In this work, we propose to improve the information aggregation for multi-head attention with a more powerful routing-by-agreement algorithm. Specifically, the routing algorithm iteratively updates the proportion of how much a part (i.e. the distinct information learned from a specific subspace) should be assigned to a whole (i.e. the final output representation), based on the agreement between parts and wholes. Experimental results on linguistic probing tasks and machine translation tasks prove the superiority of the advanced information aggregation over the standard linear transformation.

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arXiv2019

Dynamic Layer Aggregation for Neural Machine Translation with Routing-by-Agreement

With the promising progress of deep neural networks, layer aggregation has been used to fuse information across layers in various fields, such as computer vision and machine translation. However, most of the previous methods combine layers in a static fashion in that their aggregation strategy is independent of specific hidden states. Inspired by recent progress on capsule networks, in this paper we propose to use routing-by-agreement strategies to aggregate layers dynamically. Specifically, the algorithm learns the probability of a part (individual layer representations) assigned to a whole (aggregated representations) in an iterative way and combines parts accordingly. We implement our algorithm on top of the state-of-the-art neural machine translation model TRANSFORMER and conduct experiments on the widely-used WMT14 English-German and WMT17 Chinese-English translation datasets. Experimental results across language pairs show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the strong baseline model and a representative static aggregation model.

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arXiv2018

Exploiting Deep Representations for Neural Machine Translation

Advanced neural machine translation (NMT) models generally implement encoder and decoder as multiple layers, which allows systems to model complex functions and capture complicated linguistic structures. However, only the top layers of encoder and decoder are leveraged in the subsequent process, which misses the opportunity to exploit the useful information embedded in other layers. In this work, we propose to simultaneously expose all of these signals with layer aggregation and multi-layer attention mechanisms. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary regularization term to encourage different layers to capture diverse information. Experimental results on widely-used WMT14 English-German and WMT17 Chinese-English translation data demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the proposed approach.

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arXiv2018

SkipNet: Learning Dynamic Routing in Convolutional Networks

While deeper convolutional networks are needed to achieve maximum accuracy in visual perception tasks, for many inputs shallower networks are sufficient. We exploit this observation by learning to skip convolutional layers on a per-input basis. We introduce SkipNet, a modified residual network, that uses a gating network to selectively skip convolutional blocks based on the activations of the previous layer. We formulate the dynamic skipping problem in the context of sequential decision making and propose a hybrid learning algorithm that combines supervised learning and reinforcement learning to address the challenges of non-differentiable skipping decisions. We show SkipNet reduces computation by 30-90% while preserving the accuracy of the original model on four benchmark datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art dynamic networks and static compression methods. We also qualitatively evaluate the gating policy to reveal a relationship between image scale and saliency and the number of layers skipped.

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