Alex Tamkin


2023

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Oolong: Investigating What Makes Transfer Learning Hard with Controlled Studies
Zhengxuan Wu | Alex Tamkin | Isabel Papadimitriou
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

When we transfer a pretrained language model to a new language, there are many axes of variation that change at once. To disentangle the impact of different factors like syntactic similarity and vocabulary similarity, we propose a set of controlled transfer studies: we systematically transform the language of the GLUE benchmark, altering one axis of crosslingual variation at a time, and then measure the resulting drops in a pretrained model’s downstream performance. We find that models can largely recover from syntactic-style shifts, but cannot recover from vocabulary misalignment and embedding matrix re-initialization, even with continued pretraining on 15 million tokens. Moreover, good-quality tokenizers in the transfer language do not make vocabulary alignment easier. Our experiments provide insights into the factors of cross-lingual transfer that researchers should most focus on when designing language transfer scenarios.

2020

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Investigating Transferability in Pretrained Language Models
Alex Tamkin | Trisha Singh | Davide Giovanardi | Noah Goodman
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

How does language model pretraining help transfer learning? We consider a simple ablation technique for determining the impact of each pretrained layer on transfer task performance. This method, partial reinitialization, involves replacing different layers of a pretrained model with random weights, then finetuning the entire model on the transfer task and observing the change in performance. This technique reveals that in BERT, layers with high probing performance on downstream GLUE tasks are neither necessary nor sufficient for high accuracy on those tasks. Furthermore, the benefit of using pretrained parameters for a layer varies dramatically with finetuning dataset size: parameters that provide tremendous performance improvement when data is plentiful may provide negligible benefits in data-scarce settings. These results reveal the complexity of the transfer learning process, highlighting the limitations of methods that operate on frozen models or single data samples.

2019

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Recursive Routing Networks: Learning to Compose Modules for Language Understanding
Ignacio Cases | Clemens Rosenbaum | Matthew Riemer | Atticus Geiger | Tim Klinger | Alex Tamkin | Olivia Li | Sandhini Agarwal | Joshua D. Greene | Dan Jurafsky | Christopher Potts | Lauri Karttunen
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

We introduce Recursive Routing Networks (RRNs), which are modular, adaptable models that learn effectively in diverse environments. RRNs consist of a set of functions, typically organized into a grid, and a meta-learner decision-making component called the router. The model jointly optimizes the parameters of the functions and the meta-learner’s policy for routing inputs through those functions. RRNs can be incorporated into existing architectures in a number of ways; we explore adding them to word representation layers, recurrent network hidden layers, and classifier layers. Our evaluation task is natural language inference (NLI). Using the MultiNLI corpus, we show that an RRN’s routing decisions reflect the high-level genre structure of that corpus. To show that RRNs can learn to specialize to more fine-grained semantic distinctions, we introduce a new corpus of NLI examples involving implicative predicates, and show that the model components become fine-tuned to the inferential signatures that are characteristic of these predicates.