Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation. However, their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process, posing challenges for real-time applications. This paper introduces Lexical Unit Decoding (LUD), a novel decoding methodology implemented in a data-driven manner, accelerating the decoding process without sacrificing output quality. The core of our approach is the observation that a pre-trained language model can confidently predict multiple contiguous tokens, forming the basis for a lexical unit, in which these contiguous tokens could be decoded in parallel. Extensive experiments validate that our method substantially reduces decoding time while maintaining generation quality, i.e., 33% speed up on natural language generation with no quality loss, and 30% speed up on code generation with a negligible quality loss of 3%. Distinctively, LUD requires no auxiliary models and does not require changes to existing architectures. It can also be integrated with other decoding acceleration methods, thus achieving an even more pronounced inference efficiency boost. We posit that the foundational principles of LUD could define a new decoding paradigm for future language models, enhancing their applicability for a broader spectrum of applications. All codes are be publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Lexical-Unit-Decoding-LUD-.

Demonstration learning aims to guide the prompt prediction by providing answered demonstrations in the few shot settings. Despite achieving promising results, existing work only concatenates the answered examples as demonstrations to the prompt template (including the raw context) without any additional operation, neglecting the prompt-demonstration dependencies. Besides, prior research found that randomly replacing the labels of demonstrations marginally hurts performance, illustrating that the model could not properly learn the knowledge brought by the demonstrations. Inspired by the human learning process, in this paper, we introduce Imitation DEMOnstration learning (Imitation-Demo) to strengthen demonstration learning via explicitly imitating human review behaviour, which includes: (1) contrastive learning mechanism to concentrate on similar demonstrations.(2) demonstration-label re-prediction method to consolidate known knowledge. Experiment results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 out of 14 classification corpus. Further studies also prove that Imitation-Demo strengthens the associations between the prompt and demonstrations, which could provide the basis for exploring how demonstration learning works.

Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) boosts many e-commerce platform services such as targeted recommendation, product retrieval and question answering. Most previous studies adopt an extractive framework such as named entity recognition (NER) to capture subtokens in the product descriptions as the corresponding values of target attributes. However, in the real world scenario, there also exist implicit attribute values that are not mentioned explicitly but embedded in the image information and implied text meaning of products, for which the power of extractive methods is severely constrained. To address the above issues, we exploit a unified multi-modal AVE framework named DEFLATE (a multi-modal unifieD framEwork For impLicit And expliciT AVE) to acquire implicit attribute values in addition to the explicit ones. DEFLATE consists of a QA-based generation model to produce candidate attribute values from the product information of different modalities, and a discriminative model to ensure the credibility of the generated answers. Meanwhile, to provide a testbed that close to the real world, we collect and annotate a multi-modal dataset with parts of implicit attribute values. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets demonstrate that DEFLATE significantly outperforms previous methods on the extraction of implicit attribute values, while achieving comparable performance for the explicit ones.

A wide range of NLP tasks benefit from the fine-tuning of pretrained language models (PLMs). However, a number of redundant parameters which contribute less to the downstream task are observed in a directly fine-tuned model. We consider the gap between pretraining and downstream tasks hinders the training of these redundant parameters, and results in a suboptimal performance of the overall model. In this paper, we present PATS (Perturbation According To Sensitivity), a noisy training mechanism which considers each parameter’s importance in the downstream task to help fine-tune PLMs. The main idea of PATS is to add bigger noise to parameters with lower sensitivity and vice versa, in order to activate more parameters’ contributions to downstream tasks without affecting the sensitive ones much. Extensive experiments conducted on different tasks of the GLUE benchmark show PATS can consistently empower the fine-tuning of different sizes of PLMs, and the parameters in the well-performing models always have more concentrated distributions of sensitivities, which experimentally proves the effectiveness of our method.

The key challenge of question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) is the inconsistency between the natural language questions and the reasoning paths in the knowledge base (KB). Recent graph-based KBQA methods are good at grasping the topological structure of the graph but often ignore the textual information carried by the nodes and edges. Meanwhile, pre-trained language models learn massive open-world knowledge from the large corpus, but it is in the natural language form and not structured. To bridge the gap between the natural language and the structured KB, we propose three relation learning tasks for BERT-based KBQA, including relation extraction, relation matching, and relation reasoning. By relation-augmented training, the model learns to align the natural language expressions to the relations in the KB as well as reason over the missing connections in the KB. Experiments on WebQSP show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, especially when the KB is incomplete.

Verifying fact on semi-structured evidence like tables requires the ability to encode structural information and perform symbolic reasoning. Pre-trained language models trained on natural language could not be directly applied to encode tables, because simply linearizing tables into sequences will lose the cell alignment information. To better utilize pre-trained transformers for table representation, we propose a Structure-Aware Transformer (SAT), which injects the table structural information into the mask of the self-attention layer. A method to combine symbolic and linguistic reasoning is also explored for this task. Our method outperforms baseline with 4.93% on TabFact, a large scale table verification dataset.