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Publications
Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned
The surging demand for multilingual dialogue systems often requires a costly labeling process for each language addition. For low resource l… (see more)anguages, human annotators are continuously tasked with the adaptation of resource-rich language utterances for each new domain. However, this prohibitive and impractical process can often be a bottleneck for low resource languages that are still without proper translation systems nor parallel corpus. In particular, it is difficult to obtain task-specific low resource language annotations for the English-derived creoles (e.g. Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin). To address this issue, we utilize the pretrained language models i.e. BART which has shown great potential in language generation/understanding – we propose to finetune the BART model to generate utterances in Pidgin by leveraging the proximity of the source and target languages, and utilizing positive and negative examples in constrastive training objectives. We collected and released the first parallel Pidgin-English conversation corpus in two dialogue domains and showed that this simple and effective technique is suffice to yield impressive results for English-to-Pidgin generation, which are two closely-related languages.
We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskinclud… (see more)ed both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.
We present a framework for video modeling based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models that produces long-duration video completions in… (see more) a variety of realistic environments. We introduce a generative model that can at test-time sample any arbitrary subset of video frames conditioned on any other subset and present an architecture adapted for this purpose. Doing so allows us to efficiently compare and optimize a variety of schedules for the order in which frames in a long video are sampled and use selective sparse and long-range conditioning on previously sampled frames. We demonstrate improved video modeling over prior work on a number of datasets and sample temporally coherent videos over 25 minutes in length. We additionally release a new video modeling dataset and semantically meaningful metrics based on videos generated in the CARLA autonomous driving simulator.
In this review, we aim to inspire research into 001 S elf-S upervised S hared S emantic S pace ( S5 ) 002 multimodal learning problems. We e… (see more)quip non-003 expert researchers with a framework of in-004 formed modeling decisions via an extensive 005 literature review, an actionable modeling check-006 list, as well as a series of novel zero-shot eval-007 uation tasks. The core idea for our S5 check-008 list lies in learning contextual multimodal in-009 teractions at various granularity levels via a 010 shared Transformer encoder with a denoising 011 loss term, which is also regularized by a con-012 trastive loss term to induce a semantic align-013 ment prior on the contextual embedding space. 014 Essentially, we aim to model human concept 015 understanding and thus learn to “put a name to 016 a face”. This ultimately enables interpretable 017 zero-shot S5 generalization on a variety of 018 novel downstream tasks. In summary, this re-019 view provides sufficient background and ac-020 tionable strategies for training cutting-edge S5 021 multimodal networks. 022
Neurons in the brain have rich and adaptive input-output properties. Features such as diverse f-I curves and spike frequency adaptation are … (see more)known to place single neurons in optimal coding regimes when facing changing stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how brain circuits exploit single neuron flexibility, and how network-level requirements may have shaped such cellular function. To answer this question, a multi-scaled approach is needed where the computations of single neurons and of neural circuits must be considered as a complete system. In this work, we use artificial neural networks to systematically investigate single neuron input-output adaptive mechanisms, optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Throughout the optimization process, each neuron has the liberty to modify its nonlinear activation function, parametrized to mimic f-I curves of biological neurons, and to learn adaptation strategies to modify activation functions in real-time during a task. We find that such networks show much-improved robustness to noise and changes in input statistics. Importantly, we find that this procedure recovers precise coding strategies found in biological neurons, such as gain scaling and fractional order differentiation/integration. Using tools from dynamical systems theory, we analyze the role of these emergent single neuron properties and argue that neural diversity and adaptation plays an active regularization role that enables neural circuits to optimally propagate information across time.
Neurons in the brain have rich and adaptive input-output properties. Features such as diverse f-I curves and spike frequency adaptation are … (see more)known to place single neurons in optimal coding regimes when facing changing stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how brain circuits exploit single neuron flexibility, and how network-level requirements may have shaped such cellular function. To answer this question, a multi-scaled approach is needed where the computations of single neurons and of neural circuits must be considered as a complete system. In this work, we use artificial neural networks to systematically investigate single neuron input-output adaptive mechanisms, optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Throughout the optimization process, each neuron has the liberty to modify its nonlinear activation function, parametrized to mimic f-I curves of biological neurons, and to learn adaptation strategies to modify activation functions in real-time during a task. We find that such networks show much-improved robustness to noise and changes in input statistics. Importantly, we find that this procedure recovers precise coding strategies found in biological neurons, such as gain scaling and fractional order differentiation/integration. Using tools from dynamical systems theory, we analyze the role of these emergent single neuron properties and argue that neural diversity and adaptation plays an active regularization role that enables neural circuits to optimally propagate information across time.
The study of first-order optimization is sensitive to the assumptions made on the objective functions.
These assumptions induce complexity c… (see more)lasses which play a key role in worst-case analysis, including
the fundamental concept of algorithm optimality. Recent work argues that strong convexity and
smoothness—popular assumptions in literature—lead to a pathological definition of the condition
number. Motivated by this result, we focus on the class of functions
satisfying a lower restricted secant inequality and an upper error bound. On top of being robust to
the aforementioned pathological behavior and including some non-convex functions, this pair of
conditions displays interesting geometrical properties. In particular, the necessary and sufficient
conditions to interpolate a set of points and their gradients within the class can be separated into
simple conditions on each sampled gradient. This allows the performance estimation problem (PEP)
to be solved analytically, leading to a lower bound
on the convergence rate that proves gradient descent to be exactly optimal on this class of functions
among all first-order algorithms.
Plants are dynamic systems that are integral to our existence and survival. Plants face environment changes and adapt over time to their sur… (see more)rounding conditions. We argue that plant responses to an environmental stimulus are a good example of a real-world problem that can be approached within a reinforcement learning (RL)framework. With the objective of controlling a plant by moving the light source, we propose GrowSpace, as a new RL benchmark. The back-end of the simulator is implemented using the Space Colonisation Algorithm, a plant growing model based on competition for space. Compared to video game RL environments, this simulator addresses a real-world problem and serves as a test bed to visualize plant growth and movement in a faster way than physical experiments. GrowSpace is composed of a suite of challenges that tackle several problems such as control, multi-stage learning,fairness and multi-objective learning. We provide agent baselines alongside case studies to demonstrate the difficulty of the proposed benchmark.
Distantly-supervised relation extraction 001 (DSRE) is an effective method to scale relation 002 extraction (RE) to large unlabeled corpora … (see more)003 with the utilization of knowledge bases (KBs), 004 but suffers from the scale of KBs and the 005 introduced noise. 006 To alleviate the above two problems, we 007 propose a novel framework called S elf-008 devel O pment r U le ex P ansion ( SOUP ), which 009 starts from limited amount of labeled data 010 and continuously produces low-noise labels on 011 large-scaled unlabeled data by a growing learn-012 able logical rules set. 013 Specifically, SOUP achieves a mutual enhance-014 ment of RE model and logical rules set, first 015 a RE model is trained on the labeled data to 016 summarize the knowledge, then the knowledge 017 is utilized to explore candidate rules from unla-018 beled data, finally high-quality candidates are 019 selected in a graph-based ranking manner to ex-020 tend the logical rules set and new rule-labeled 021 data are provided for better RE model training. 022 Experiments on wiki20 dataset demonstrate 023 that, with limited seed knowledge from small-024 scaled manually labeled data, SOUP achieves 025 significant improvement compared to baselines 026 by producing continuous growth of both logical 027 rules and the RE model, and that labeling noise 028 of SOUP is much less than DS. Furthermore, 029 RE model enhanced by SOUP with 1.6k logical 030 rules learned from prior knowledge could pro-031 duce an equivalent performance to the model 032 trained on data labeled in DS manner by 72k 033 relational facts of KBs. 034
