Latent semantic models, such as LSA, intend to map a query to its relevant documents at the semantic level where keyword-based matching often fails. In this study we strive to develop a series of new latent semantic models with a deep structure that project queries and documents into a common low-dimensional space where the relevance of a document given a query is readily computed as the distance between them. The proposed deep structured semantic models are discriminatively trained by maximizing the conditional likelihood of the clicked documents given a query using the clickthrough data. To make our models applicable to large-scale Web search applications, we also use a technique called word hashing, which is shown to effectively scale up our semantic models to handle large vocabularies which are common in such tasks. The new models are evaluated on a Web document ranking task using a real-world data set. Results show that our best model significantly outperforms other latent semantic models, which were considered state-of-the-art in the performance prior to the work presented in this paper.

No abstract

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Neural networks are part of many contemporary NLP systems, yet their empirical successes come at the price of vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Previous work has used adversarial training and data augmentation to partially mitigate such brittleness, but these are unlikely to find worst-case adversaries due to the complexity of the search space arising from discrete text perturbations. In this work, we approach the problem from the opposite direction: to formally verify a system's robustness against a predefined class of adversarial attacks. We study text classification under synonym replacements or character flip perturbations. We propose modeling these input perturbations as a simplex and then using Interval Bound Propagation -a formal model verification method. We modify the conventional loglikelihood training objective to train models that can be efficiently verified, which would otherwise come with exponential search complexity. The resulting models show only little difference in terms of nominal accuracy, but have much improved verified accuracy under perturbations and come with an efficiently computable formal guarantee on worst case adversaries.

No abstract

This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences.

Despite their theoretical appeal and grounding in tractable convex optimization techniques, kernel methods are often not the first choice for large-scale speech applications due to their significant memory requirements and computational expense. In recent years, randomized approximate feature maps have emerged as an elegant mechanism to scale-up kernel methods. Still, in practice, a large number of random features is required to obtain acceptable accuracy in predictive tasks. In this paper, we develop two algorithmic schemes to address this computational bottleneck in the context of kernel ridge regression. The first scheme is a specialized distributed block coordinate descent procedure that avoids the explicit materialization of the feature space data matrix, while the second scheme gains efficiency by combining multiple weak random feature models in an ensemble learning framework. We demonstrate that these schemes enable kernel methods to match the performance of state of the art Deep Neural Networks on TIMIT for speech recognition and classification tasks. In particular, we obtain the best classification error rates reported on TIMIT using kernel methods.

Programming is a powerful and ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Systems that can assist programmers or even generate programs themselves could make programming more productive and accessible. Recent transformer-based neural network models show impressive code generation abilities yet still perform poorly on more complex tasks requiring problem-solving skills, such as competitive programming problems. Here, we introduce AlphaCode, a system for code generation that achieved an average ranking in the top 54.3% in simulated evaluations on recent programming competitions on the Codeforces platform. AlphaCode solves problems by generating millions of diverse programs using specially trained transformer-based networks and then filtering and clustering those programs to a maximum of just 10 submissions. This result marks the first time an artificial intelligence system has performed competitively in programming competitions.