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Koustuv Sinha

Alumni

Publications

Measuring Systematic Generalization in Neural Proof Generation with Transformers
Nicolas Gontier
Koustuv Sinha
Siva Reddy
Christopher Pal
We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded… (see more) in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a logical reasoning task in natural language, which involves reasoning over relationships between entities grounded in first-order logical proofs. Specifically, we perform soft theorem-proving by leveraging TLMs to generate natural language proofs. We test the generated proofs for logical consistency, along with the accuracy of the final inference. We observe length-generalization issues when evaluated on longer-than-trained sequences. However, we observe TLMs improve their generalization performance after being exposed to longer, exhaustive proofs. In addition, we discover that TLMs are able to generalize better using backward-chaining proofs compared to their forward-chaining counterparts, while they find it easier to generate forward chaining proofs. We observe that models that are not trained to generate proofs are better at generalizing to problems based on longer proofs. This suggests that Transformers have efficient internal reasoning strategies that are harder to interpret. These results highlight the systematic generalization behavior of TLMs in the context of logical reasoning, and we believe this work motivates deeper inspection of their underlying reasoning strategies.
2020-12-06
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (Accept (poster))
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Hierarchical Neural Attention-based Text Classifier
Koustuv Sinha
Yue Dong
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Derek Ruths
Deep neural networks have been displaying superior performance over traditional supervised classifiers in text classification. They learn to… (see more) extract useful features automatically when sufficient amount of data is presented. However, along with the growth in the number of documents comes the increase in the number of categories, which often results in poor performance of the multiclass classifiers. In this work, we use external knowledge in the form of topic category taxonomies to aide the classification by introducing a deep hierarchical neural attention-based classifier. Our model performs better than or comparable to state-of-the-art hierarchical models at significantly lower computational cost while maintaining high interpretability.
2018-09-30
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)
doi.org