Most sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models are autoregressive; they generate each token by conditioning on previously generated tokens. In contrast, non-autoregressive seq2seq models generate all tokens in one pass, which leads to increased efficiency through parallel processing on hardware such as GPUs. However, directly modeling the joint distribution of all tokens simultaneously is challenging, and even with increasingly complex model structures accuracy lags significantly behind autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient, and effective model for non-autoregressive sequence generation using latent variable models. Specifically, we turn to generative flow, an elegant technique to model complex distributions using neural networks, and design several layers of flow tailored for modeling the conditional density of sequential latent variables. We evaluate this model on three neural machine translation (NMT) benchmark datasets, achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art nonautoregressive NMT models and almost constant decoding time w.r.t the sequence length. 1
Semantic parsing is the task of transducing natural language (NL) utterances into formal meaning representations (MRs), commonly represented as tree structures. Annotating NL utterances with their corresponding MRs is expensive and timeconsuming, and thus the limited availability of labeled data often becomes the bottleneck of data-driven, supervised models. We introduce STRUCTVAE, a variational auto-encoding model for semisupervised semantic parsing, which learns both from limited amounts of parallel data, and readily-available unlabeled NL utterances. STRUCTVAE models latent MRs not observed in the unlabeled data as treestructured latent variables. Experiments on semantic parsing on the ATIS domain and Python code generation show that with extra unlabeled data, STRUCTVAE outperforms strong supervised models. 1
Labeled sequence transduction is a task of transforming one sequence into another sequence that satisfies desiderata specified by a set of labels. In this paper we propose multi-space variational encoderdecoders, a new model for labeled sequence transduction with semi-supervised learning. The generative model can use neural networks to handle both discrete and continuous latent variables to exploit various features of data. Experiments show that our model provides not only a powerful supervised framework but also can effectively take advantage of the unlabeled data. On the SIGMORPHON morphological inflection benchmark, our model outperforms single-model state-ofart results by a large margin for the majority of languages. 1
Fine-tuning large pretrained language models on downstream tasks has become the de-facto learning paradigm in NLP. However, conventional approaches finetune all the parameters of the pretrained model, which becomes prohibitive as the model size and the number of tasks grow. Recent work has proposed a variety of parameter-efficient transfer learning methods that only fine-tune a small number of (extra) parameters to attain strong performance. While effective, the critical ingredients for success and the connections among the various methods are poorly understood. In this paper, we break down the design of state-of-the-art parameter-efficient transfer learning methods and present a unified framework that establishes connections between them. Specifically, we re-frame them as modifications to specific hidden states in pretrained models, and define a set of design dimensions along which different methods vary, such as the function to compute the modification and the position to apply the modification. Through comprehensive empirical studies across machine translation, text summarization, language understanding, and text classification benchmarks, we utilize the unified view to identify important design choices in previous methods. Furthermore, our unified framework enables the transfer of design elements across different approaches, and as a result we are able to instantiate new parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods that tune less parameters than previous methods while being more effective, achieving comparable results to fine-tuning all parameters on all four tasks. * Equal Contribution. Order determined by random dice rolling.
Neural sequence models can generate highly fluent sentences, but recent studies have also shown that they are also prone to hallucinate additional content not supported by the input. These variety of fluent but wrong outputs are particularly problematic, as it will not be possible for users to tell they are being presented incorrect content. To detect these errors, we propose a task to predict whether each token in the output sequence is hallucinated (not contained in the input) and collect new manually annotated evaluation sets for this task. We also introduce a method for learning to detect hallucinations using pretrained language models fine tuned on synthetic data that includes automatically inserted hallucinations. Experiments on machine translation (MT) and abstractive summarization demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines on all benchmark datasets. We further demonstrate how to use the token-level hallucination labels to define a fine-grained loss over the target sequence in low-resource MT and achieve significant improvements over strong baseline methods. We also apply our method to word-level quality estimation for MT and show its effectiveness in both supervised and unsupervised settings 1 . * Most work was done during an internship at FAIR.
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