Zonghan Yang


2023

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Bridging the Gap between Decision and Logits in Decision-based Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models
Qinhong Zhou | Zonghan Yang | Peng Li | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods require access to the internal information of teachers, e.g., logits. However, such information may not always be accessible for large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this work, we focus on decision-based KD for PLMs, where only teacher decisions (i.e., top-1 labels) are accessible. Considering the information gap between logits and decisions, we propose a novel method to estimate logits from the decision distributions. Specifically, decision distributions can be both derived as a function of logits theoretically and estimated with test-time data augmentation empirically. By combining the theoretical and empirical estimations of the decision distributions together, the estimation of logits can be successfully reduced to a simple root-finding problem. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines on both natural language understanding and machine reading comprehension datasets.

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Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning
Yusheng Su | Chi-Min Chan | Jiali Cheng | Yujia Qin | Yankai Lin | Shengding Hu | Zonghan Yang | Ning Ding | Xingzhi Sun | Guotong Xie | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can effectively drive extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs) by training only minimal parameters. Different PET methods utilize different manually designed tunable modules. In small PLMs, there are usually noticeable performance differences among PET methods. Nevertheless, as the model scale increases, the performance differences become marginal. Hence, we hypothesize that model scaling mitigates the impact of design differences on PET methods. To investigate this hypothesis, we introduce a more flexible PET method called Arbitrary PET (APET) method. The APET method is compatible with a tunable module, which consists of any number of parameters distributed in arbitrary positions. Then, we utilize it and conduct experiments on 11 NLP tasks across 3 representative PLMs. Our investigations reveal that model scaling (1) mitigates the effects of the positions of tunable parameters on performance, and (2) enables tuning methods to achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning by optimizing fewer tunable parameters. Intriguingly, we also observe that tuning methods optimize the similar number of tunable parameters to exceed random guess performance on different tasks. We collectively discuss this phenomenon and the two aforementioned findings from an optimization perspective to understand the underlying mechanisms. These conclusions enhance our understanding of the impact of model scaling on PET and assist in designing more effective and efficient PET methods for PLMs of different scales. The source code can be obtained from this GitHub repository: https://github.com/yushengsu-thu/PET_Scaling.

2021

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Alternated Training with Synthetic and Authentic Data for Neural Machine Translation
Rui Jiao | Zonghan Yang | Maosong Sun | Yang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2019

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Reducing Word Omission Errors in Neural Machine Translation: A Contrastive Learning Approach
Zonghan Yang | Yong Cheng | Yang Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

While neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable success, NMT systems are prone to make word omission errors. In this work, we propose a contrastive learning approach to reducing word omission errors in NMT. The basic idea is to enable the NMT model to assign a higher probability to a ground-truth translation and a lower probability to an erroneous translation, which is automatically constructed from the ground-truth translation by omitting words. We design different types of negative examples depending on the number of omitted words, word frequency, and part of speech. Experiments on Chinese-to-English, German-to-English, and Russian-to-English translation tasks show that our approach is effective in reducing word omission errors and achieves better translation performance than three baseline methods.