Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to process extensive context lengths incurs prohibitive computational costs. Prevailing techniques for extending context capabilities in LLMs typically require not only additional training procedures but also access to datasets with long context (e.g., sequences of 32K tokens), presupposing substantial GPU expenditures. To address the aforementioned issues, we introduce a novel solution named Efficient and Extreme length extension for Large Language Models (E2-LLM). E2-LLM entails a singular training process over considerably short sequences (e.g., 4K tokens), which greatly mitigates the cost of continual-pretraining or fine-tuning. Within the training phase, we incorporate a dual augmentation strategy with Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) that adjusts the scale and position indices across distinct training samples. E 2 -LLM is meticulously designed to enhance the model’s robustness to diverse relative positions. The experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of E 2 -LLM on demanding tasks of processing long contexts.

This paper introduces ConceptMath, a bilingual (English and Chinese), fine-grained benchmark that evaluates concept-wise mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional benchmarks that evaluate general mathematical reasoning with an average accuracy, ConceptMath systemically organizes math problems under a hierarchy of math concepts, so that mathematical reasoning can be evaluated at different granularity with concept-wise accuracies. Based on our ConcepthMath, we then evaluate a broad range of LLMs, and we observe existing LLMs, though achieving high average accuracies on traditional benchmarks, exhibit significant performance variations across different math concepts and may even fail catastrophically on the most basic ones. Besides, we also introduce an efficient fine-tuning strategy to enhance the weaknesses of existing LLMs. Finally, we hope ConceptMath could guide the developers to understand the fine-grained mathematical abilities of their models and facilitate the growth of foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/conceptmath/conceptmath.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has drastically enhanced dialogue systems. However, comprehensively evaluating the dialogue abilities of LLMs remains a challenge. Previous benchmarks have primarily focused on single-turn dialogues or provided coarse-grained and incomplete assessments of multi-turn dialogues, overlooking the complexity and fine-grained nuances of real-life dialogues. To address this issue, we introduce MT-Bench-101, specifically designed to evaluate the fine-grained abilities of LLMs in multi-turn dialogues. By conducting a detailed analysis of real multi-turn dialogue data, we construct a three-tier hierarchical ability taxonomy comprising 4208 turns across 1388 multi-turn dialogues in 13 distinct tasks. We then evaluate 21 popular LLMs based on MT-Bench-101, conducting comprehensive analyses from both ability and task perspectives and observing differing trends in LLMs performance across dialogue turns within various tasks. Further analysis indicates that neither utilizing common alignment techniques nor chat-specific designs has led to obvious enhancements in the multi-turn abilities of LLMs. Extensive case studies suggest that our designed tasks accurately assess the corresponding multi-turn abilities. The data and code are available at https://github.com/mtbench101/mt-bench-101.

Video storytelling is engaging multimedia content that utilizes video and its accompanying narration to share a story and attract the audience, where a key challenge is creating narrations for recorded visual scenes. Previous studies on dense video captioning and video story generation have made some progress. However, in practical applications, we typically require synchronized narrations for ongoing visual scenes. In this work, we introduce a new task of Synchronized Video Storytelling, which aims to generate synchronous and informative narrations for videos. These narrations, associated with each video clip, should relate to the visual content, integrate relevant knowledge, and have an appropriate word count corresponding to the clip’s duration. Specifically, a structured storyline is beneficial to guide the generation process, ensuring coherence and integrity. To support the exploration of this task, we introduce a new benchmark dataset E-SyncVidStory with rich annotations. Since existing Multimodal LLMs are not effective in addressing this task in one-shot or few-shot settings, we propose a framework named VideoNarrator that can generate a storyline for input videos and simultaneously generate narrations with the guidance of the generated or predefined storyline. We further introduce a set of evaluation metrics to thoroughly assess the generation. Both automatic and human evaluations validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our dataset, codes, and evaluations will be released.

Multilingual spoken language understanding (SLU) consists of two sub-tasks, namely intent detection and slot filling. To improve the performance of these two sub-tasks, we propose to use consistency regularization based on a hybrid data augmentation strategy. The consistency regularization enforces the predicted distributions for an example and its semantically equivalent augmentation to be consistent. We conduct experiments on the MASSIVE dataset under both full-dataset and zero-shot settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method improves the performance on both intent detection and slot filling tasks. Our system ranked 1st in the MMNLU-22 competition under the full-dataset setting.

This paper focuses on automatically generating the text of an ad, and the goal is that the generated text can capture user interest for achieving higher click-through rate (CTR). We propose CREATER, a CTR-driven advertising text generation approach, to generate ad texts based on high-quality user reviews. To incorporate CTR objective, our model learns from online A/B test data with contrastive learning, which encourages the model to generate ad texts that obtain higher CTR. To make use of large-scale unpaired reviews, we design a customized self-supervised objective reducing the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning. Experiments on industrial datasets show that CREATER significantly outperforms current approaches. It has been deployed online in a leading advertising platform and brings uplift on core online metrics.

In this paper, we introduce ELECTRA-style tasks to cross-lingual language model pre-training. Specifically, we present two pre-training tasks, namely multilingual replaced token detection, and translation replaced token detection. Besides, we pretrain the model, named as XLM-E, on both multilingual and parallel corpora. Our model outperforms the baseline models on various cross-lingual understanding tasks with much less computation cost. Moreover, analysis shows that XLM-E tends to obtain better cross-lingual transferability.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique can scale up the model size of Transformers with an affordable computational overhead. We point out that existing learning-to-route MoE methods suffer from the routing fluctuation issue, i.e., the target expert of the same input may change along with training, but only one expert will be activated for the input during inference. The routing fluctuation tends to harm sample efficiency because the same input updates different experts but only one is finally used. In this paper, we propose StableMoE with two training stages to address the routing fluctuation problem. In the first training stage, we learn a balanced and cohesive routing strategy and distill it into a lightweight router decoupled from the backbone model. In the second training stage, we utilize the distilled router to determine the token-to-expert assignment and freeze it for a stable routing strategy. We validate our method on language modeling and multilingual machine translation. The results show that StableMoE outperforms existing MoE methods in terms of both convergence speed and performance.

Fine-tuning pre-trained cross-lingual language models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the others. In this work, we propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization. Specifically, we use example consistency regularization to penalize the prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations, i.e., subword sampling, Gaussian noise, code-switch substitution, and machine translation. In addition, we employ model consistency to regularize the models trained with two augmented versions of the same training set. Experimental results on the XTREME benchmark show that our method significantly improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across various tasks, including text classification, question answering, and sequence labeling.

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-label word alignments for parallel sentences. Then we randomly mask tokens in a bitext pair. Given a masked token, the model uses a pointer network to predict the aligned token in the other language. We alternately perform the above two steps in an expectation-maximization manner. Experimental results show that our method improves cross-lingual transferability on various datasets, especially on the token-level tasks, such as question answering, and structured prediction. Moreover, the model can serve as a pretrained word aligner, which achieves reasonably low error rate on the alignment benchmarks. The code and pretrained parameters are available at github.com/CZWin32768/XLM-Align.

Compared to monolingual models, cross-lingual models usually require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages adequately. We find that many languages are under-represented in recent cross-lingual language models due to the limited vocabulary capacity. To this end, we propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. However, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed. In order to address the issues, we propose k-NN-based target sampling to accelerate the expensive softmax. Our experiments show that the multilingual vocabulary learned with VoCap benefits cross-lingual language model pre-training. Moreover, k-NN-based target sampling mitigates the side-effects of increasing the vocabulary size while achieving comparable performance and faster pre-training speed. The code and the pretrained multilingual vocabularies are available at https://github.com/bozheng-hit/VoCapXLM.

Natural Questions is a new challenging machine reading comprehension benchmark with two-grained answers, which are a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities inside the long answer). Despite the effectiveness of existing methods on this benchmark, they treat these two sub-tasks individually during training while ignoring their dependencies. To address this issue, we present a novel multi-grained machine reading comprehension framework that focuses on modeling documents at their hierarchical nature, which are different levels of granularity: documents, paragraphs, sentences, and tokens. We utilize graph attention networks to obtain different levels of representations so that they can be learned simultaneously. The long and short answers can be extracted from paragraph-level representation and token-level representation, respectively. In this way, we can model the dependencies between the two-grained answers to provide evidence for each other. We jointly train the two sub-tasks, and our experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous systems at both long and short answer criteria.

In this paper, we propose a new rich resource enhanced AMR aligner which produces multiple alignments and a new transition system for AMR parsing along with its oracle parser. Our aligner is further tuned by our oracle parser via picking the alignment that leads to the highest-scored achievable AMR graph. Experimental results show that our aligner outperforms the rule-based aligner in previous work by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-sourced AMR parsers. Based on our aligner and transition system, we develop a transition-based AMR parser that parses a sentence into its AMR graph directly. An ensemble of our parsers with only words and POS tags as input leads to 68.4 Smatch F1 score, which outperforms the current state-of-the-art parser.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford’s winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84%) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for the CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system includes three pipelined components: tokenization, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. We use character-based bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for both tokenization and POS tagging. Afterwards, we employ a list-based transition-based algorithm for general non-projective parsing and present an improved Stack-LSTM-based architecture for representing each transition state and making predictions. Furthermore, to parse low/zero-resource languages and cross-domain data, we use a model transfer approach to make effective use of existing resources. We demonstrate substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 3.76% in LAS of all languages. And finally, we rank the 4th place on the official test sets.

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED) system in the NLP-TEA-3 shared task for CGED. The CGED system can diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are redundant words (R), missing words (M), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). We treat the CGED task as a sequence labeling task and describe three models, including a CRF-based model, an LSTM-based model and an ensemble model using stacking. We also show in details how we build and train the models. Evaluation includes three levels, which are detection level, identification level and position level. On the CGED-HSK dataset of NLP-TEA-3 shared task, our system presents the best F1-scores in all the three levels and also the best recall in the last two levels.