Pretrained language models (LMs) have shown compelling performance on various downstream tasks, but unfortunately they require a tremendous amount of inference compute. Knowledge distillation finds a path to compress LMs to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm. However, when the capacity gap between the teacher and the student is large, a curse of capacity gap appears, invoking a deficiency in distilling LMs. While a few studies have been carried out to fill the gap, the curse is not yet well tackled. In this paper, we aim at lifting the curse of capacity gap via enlarging the capacity of the student without notably increasing the inference compute. Largely motivated by sparse activation regime of mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a mixture of minimal experts (MiniMoE), which imposes extra parameters to the student but introduces almost no additional inference compute. Experimental results on GLUE and CoNLL demonstrate the curse of capacity gap is lifted by the magic of MiniMoE to a large extent. MiniMoE also achieves the state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with a range of competitive baselines. With a compression rate as much as ~50×, MiniMoE preserves ~95% GLUE score of the teacher.

Unsupervised sentence representation learning is one of the fundamental problems in natural language processing with various downstream applications. Recently, contrastive learning has been widely adopted which derives high-quality sentence representations by pulling similar semantics closer and pushing dissimilar ones away. However, these methods fail to capture the fine-grained ranking information among the sentences, where each sentence is only treated as either positive or negative. In many real-world scenarios, one needs to distinguish and rank the sentences based on their similarities to a query sentence, e.g., very relevant, moderate relevant, less relevant, irrelevant, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, RankCSE, for unsupervised sentence representation learning, which incorporates ranking consistency and ranking distillation with contrastive learning into a unified framework. In particular, we learn semantically discriminative sentence representations by simultaneously ensuring ranking consistency between two representations with different dropout masks, and distilling listwise ranking knowledge from the teacher. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on both semantic textual similarity (STS) and transfer (TR) tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over several state-of-the-art baselines.

While transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have dominated a number of NLP applications, these models are heavy to deploy and expensive to use. Therefore, effectively compressing large-scale PLMs becomes an increasingly important problem. Quantization, which represents high-precision tensors with low-bit fix-point format, is a viable solution. However, most existing quantization methods are task-specific, requiring customized training and quantization with a large number of trainable parameters on each individual task. Inspired by the observation that the over-parameterization nature of PLMs makes it possible to freeze most of the parameters during the fine-tuning stage, in this work, we propose a novel “quantize before fine-tuning” framework, PreQuant, that differs from both quantization-aware training and post-training quantization. {pasted macro ‘OUR’} is compatible with various quantization strategies, with outlier-aware parameter-efficient fine-tuning incorporated to correct the induced quantization error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PreQuant on the GLUE benchmark using BERT, RoBERTa, and T5. We also provide an empirical investigation into the workflow of PreQuant, which sheds light on its efficacy.

Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A common practice of dense retrieval models is to exploit a dual-encoder architecture to represent a query and a passage independently. Though efficient, such a structure loses interaction between the query-passage pair, resulting in inferior accuracy. To enhance the performance of dense retrieval models without loss of efficiency, we propose a GNN-encoder model in which query (passage) information is fused into passage (query) representations via graph neural networks that are constructed by queries and their top retrieved passages. By this means, we maintain a dual-encoder structure, and retain some interaction information between query-passage pairs in their representations, which enables us to achieve both efficiency and efficacy in passage retrieval. Evaluation results indicate that our method significantly outperforms the existing models on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on these datasets.

Text matching is a fundamental research problem in natural language understanding. Interaction-based approaches treat the text pair as a single sequence and encode it through cross encoders, while representation-based models encode the text pair independently with siamese or dual encoders. Interaction-based models require dense computations and thus are impractical in real-world applications. Representation-based models have become the mainstream paradigm for efficient text matching. However, these models suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. To remedy this, we propose a Virtual InteRacTion mechanism (VIRT) for improving representation-based text matching while maintaining its efficiency. In particular, we introduce an interactive knowledge distillation module that is only applied during training. It enables deep interaction between texts by effectively transferring knowledge from the interaction-based model. A light interaction strategy is designed to fully leverage the learned interactive knowledge. Experimental results on six text matching benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over several state-of-the-art representation-based models. We further show that VIRT can be integrated into existing methods as plugins to lift their performances.

Existing work in multilingual pretraining has demonstrated the potential of cross-lingual transferability by training a unified Transformer encoder for multiple languages. However, much of this work only relies on the shared vocabulary and bilingual contexts to encourage the correlation across languages, which is loose and implicit for aligning the contextual representations between languages. In this paper, we plug a cross-attention module into the Transformer encoder to explicitly build the interdependence between languages. It can effectively avoid the degeneration of predicting masked words only conditioned on the context in its own language. More importantly, when fine-tuning on downstream tasks, the cross-attention module can be plugged in or out on-demand, thus naturally benefiting a wider range of cross-lingual tasks, from language understanding to generation. As a result, the proposed cross-lingual model delivers new state-of-the-art results on various cross-lingual understanding tasks of the XTREME benchmark, covering text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval. For cross-lingual generation tasks, it also outperforms all existing cross-lingual models and state-of-the-art Transformer variants on WMT14 English-to-German and English-to-French translation datasets, with gains of up to 1 2 BLEU.