Sentence representation learning benefits from data augmentation strategies to improve model performance and generalization, yet existing approaches often encounter issues such as semantic inconsistencies and feature suppression. To address these limitations, we propose a method for generating Syntactically Aligned Negative (SAN) samples through a semantic importance-aware Masked Language Model (MLM) approach. Our method quantifies semantic contributions of individual words to produce negative samples that have substantial textual overlap with the original sentences while conveying different meanings. We further introduce Hierarchical-InfoNCE (HiNCE), a novel contrastive learning objective employing differential temperature weighting to optimize the utilization of both in-batch and syntactically aligned negative samples. Extensive evaluations across seven semantic textual similarity benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art models.

The task of Sign Language Production (SLP) in machine learning involves converting text-based spoken language into corresponding sign language expressions. Sign language conveys meaning through the continuous movement of multiple articulators, including manual and non-manual channels. However, most current Transformer-based SLP models convert these multi-channel sign poses into a unified feature representation, ignoring the inherent structural correlations between channels. This paper introduces a novel approach called MCST-Transformer for skeletal sign language production. It employs multi-channel spatial attention to capture correlations across various channels within each frame, and temporal attention to learn sequential dependencies for each channel over time. Additionally, the paper explores and experiments with multiple fusion techniques to combine the spatial and temporal representations into naturalistic sign sequences. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed MCST-Transformer model and its constituent components, extensive experiments were conducted on two benchmark sign language datasets from diverse cultures. The results demonstrate that this new approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on both datasets.

BERT and other pretrained language models (PLMs) are ubiquitous in modern NLP. Even though PLMs are the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models for almost every NLP task (CITATION), the significant latency during inference prohibits wider industrial usage. In this work, we propose Patient and Confident Early Exiting BERT (PCEE-BERT), an off-the-shelf sample-dependent early exiting method that can work with different PLMs and can also work along with popular model compression methods. With a multi-exit BERT as the backbone model, PCEE-BERT will make the early exiting decision if enough numbers (patience parameter) of consecutive intermediate layers are confident about their predictions. The entropy value measures the confidence level of an intermediate layer’s prediction. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms previous SOTA early exiting methods. Ablation studies show that: (a) our method performs consistently well on other PLMs, such as ALBERT and TinyBERT; (b) PCEE-BERT can achieve different speed-up ratios by adjusting the patience parameter and the confidence threshold. The code for PCEE-BERT can be found at https://github.com/michael-wzhu/PCEE-BERT.