Sheng Shen


2023

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Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning
Niklas Muennighoff | Thomas Wang | Lintang Sutawika | Adam Roberts | Stella Biderman | Teven Le Scao | M Saiful Bari | Sheng Shen | Zheng Xin Yong | Hailey Schoelkopf | Xiangru Tang | Dragomir Radev | Alham Fikri Aji | Khalid Almubarak | Samuel Albanie | Zaid Alyafeai | Albert Webson | Edward Raff | Colin Raffel
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. We find finetuning large multilingual language models on English tasks with English prompts allows for task genrealization to non-English languages that appear only in the pretraining corpus. Finetuning on multilingual tasks with English prompts further improves performance on English and non-English tasks leading to various state-of-the-art zero-shot results. We also investigate finetuning on multilingual tasks with prompts that have been machine-translated from English to match the language of each dataset. We find training on these machine-translated prompts leads to better performance on human-written prompts in the respective languages. Surprisingly, we find models are capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks in languages they have never intentionally seen. We conjecture that the models are learning higher-level capabilities that are both task- and language-agnostic. In addition, we introduce xP3, a composite of supervised datasets in 46 languages with English and machine-translated prompts. Our code, datasets and models are freely available at https://github.com/ bigscience-workshop/xmtf.

2022

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Exposing the Limits of Video-Text Models through Contrast Sets
Jae Sung Park | Sheng Shen | Ali Farhadi | Trevor Darrell | Yejin Choi | Anna Rohrbach
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent video-text models can retrieve relevant videos based on text with a high accuracy, but to what extent do they comprehend the semantics of the text? Can they discriminate between similar entities and actions? To answer this, we propose an evaluation framework that probes video-text models with hard negatives. We automatically build contrast sets, where true textual descriptions are manipulated in ways that change their semantics while maintaining plausibility. Specifically, we leverage a pre-trained language model and a set of heuristics to create verb and person entity focused contrast sets. We apply these in the multiple choice video to-text classification setting. We test the robustness of recent methods on the proposed automatic contrast sets, and compare them to additionally collected human-generated counterparts, to assess their effectiveness. We see that model performance suffers across all methods, erasing the gap between recent CLIP-based methods vs. the earlier methods.

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What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours?
Teven Le Scao | Thomas Wang | Daniel Hesslow | Stas Bekman | M Saiful Bari | Stella Biderman | Hady Elsahar | Niklas Muennighoff | Jason Phang | Ofir Press | Colin Raffel | Victor Sanh | Sheng Shen | Lintang Sutawika | Jaesung Tae | Zheng Xin Yong | Julien Launay | Iz Beltagy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

The crystallization of modeling methods around the Transformer architecture has been a boon for practitioners. Simple, well-motivated architectural variations can transfer across tasks and scale, increasing the impact of modeling research. However, with the emergence of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameters models, large language models are increasingly expensive to accurately design and train. Notably, it can be difficult to evaluate how modeling decisions may impact emergent capabilities, given that these capabilities arise mainly from sheer scale alone.In the process of building BLOOM–the Big Science Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual language model–our goal is to identify an architecture and training setup that makes the best use of our 1,000,000 A100-GPU-hours budget.Specifically, we perform an ablation study at the billion-parameter scale comparing different modeling practices and their impact on zero-shot generalization.In addition, we study the impact of various popular pre-training corpora on zero-shot generalization. We also study the performance of a multilingual model and how it compares to the English-only one. Finally, we consider the scaling behaviour of Transformers to choose the target model size, shape, and training setup. All our models and code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/bigscience.

2021

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What’s Hidden in a One-layer Randomly Weighted Transformer?
Sheng Shen | Zhewei Yao | Douwe Kiela | Kurt Keutzer | Michael Mahoney
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We demonstrate that, hidden within one-layer randomly weighted neural networks, there exist subnetworks that can achieve impressive performance, without ever modifying the weight initializations, on machine translation tasks. To find subnetworks for one-layer randomly weighted neural networks, we apply different binary masks to the same weight matrix to generate different layers. Hidden within a one-layer randomly weighted Transformer, we find that subnetworks that can achieve 29.45/17.29 BLEU on IWSLT14/WMT14. Using a fixed pre-trained embedding layer, the previously found subnetworks are smaller than, but can match 98%/92% (34.14/25.24 BLEU) of the performance of, a trained Transformersmall/base on IWSLT14/WMT14. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of larger and deeper transformers in this setting, as well as the impact of different initialization methods.

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Reservoir Transformers
Sheng Shen | Alexei Baevski | Ari Morcos | Kurt Keutzer | Michael Auli | Douwe Kiela
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We demonstrate that transformers obtain impressive performance even when some of the layers are randomly initialized and never updated. Inspired by old and well-established ideas in machine learning, we explore a variety of non-linear “reservoir” layers interspersed with regular transformer layers, and show improvements in wall-clock compute time until convergence, as well as overall performance, on various machine translation and (masked) language modelling tasks.

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Noisy Self-Knowledge Distillation for Text Summarization
Yang Liu | Sheng Shen | Mirella Lapata
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In this paper we apply self-knowledge distillation to text summarization which we argue can alleviate problems with maximum-likelihood training on single reference and noisy datasets. Instead of relying on one-hot annotation labels, our student summarization model is trained with guidance from a teacher which generates smoothed labels to help regularize training. Furthermore, to better model uncertainty during training, we introduce multiple noise signals for both teacher and student models. We demonstrate experimentally on three benchmarks that our framework boosts the performance of both pretrained and non-pretrained summarizers achieving state-of-the-art results.

2020

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MAF: Multimodal Alignment Framework for Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding
Qinxin Wang | Hao Tan | Sheng Shen | Michael Mahoney | Zhewei Yao
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Phrase localization is a task that studies the mapping from textual phrases to regions of an image. Given difficulties in annotating phrase-to-object datasets at scale, we develop a Multimodal Alignment Framework (MAF) to leverage more widely-available caption-image datasets, which can then be used as a form of weak supervision. We first present algorithms to model phrase-object relevance by leveraging fine-grained visual representations and visually-aware language representations. By adopting a contrastive objective, our method uses information in caption-image pairs to boost the performance in weakly-supervised scenarios. Experiments conducted on the widely-adopted Flickr30k dataset show a significant improvement over existing weakly-supervised methods. With the help of the visually-aware language representations, we can also improve the previous best unsupervised result by 5.56%. We conduct ablation studies to show that both our novel model and our weakly-supervised strategies significantly contribute to our strong results.

2019

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An annotated dataset of literary entities
David Bamman | Sejal Popat | Sheng Shen
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 present a new dataset comprised of 210,532 tokens evenly drawn from 100 different English-language literary texts annotated for ACE entity categories (person, location, geo-political entity, facility, organization, and vehicle). These categories include non-named entities (such as “the boy”, “the kitchen”) and nested structure (such as [[the cook]’s sister]). In contrast to existing datasets built primarily on news (focused on geo-political entities and organizations), literary texts offer strikingly different distributions of entity categories, with much stronger emphasis on people and description of settings. We present empirical results demonstrating the performance of nested entity recognition models in this domain; training natively on in-domain literary data yields an improvement of over 20 absolute points in F-score (from 45.7 to 68.3), and mitigates a disparate impact in performance for male and female entities present in models trained on news data.

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Pragmatically Informative Text Generation
Sheng Shen | Daniel Fried | Jacob Andreas | Dan Klein
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 improve the informativeness of models for conditional text generation using techniques from computational pragmatics. These techniques formulate language production as a game between speakers and listeners, in which a speaker should generate output text that a listener can use to correctly identify the original input that the text describes. While such approaches are widely used in cognitive science and grounded language learning, they have received less attention for more standard language generation tasks. We consider two pragmatic modeling methods for text generation: one where pragmatics is imposed by information preservation, and another where pragmatics is imposed by explicit modeling of distractors. We find that these methods improve the performance of strong existing systems for abstractive summarization and generation from structured meaning representations.