The click-through rate (CTR) prediction task is to predict whether a user will click on the recommended item. As mind-boggling amounts of data are produced online daily, accelerating CTR prediction model training is critical to ensuring an up-to-date model and reducing the training cost. One approach to increase the training speed is to apply large batch training. However, as shown in computer vision and natural language processing tasks, training with a large batch easily suffers from the loss of accuracy. Our experiments show that previous scaling rules fail in the training of CTR prediction neural networks. To tackle this problem, we first theoretically show that different frequencies of ids make it challenging to scale hyperparameters when scaling the batch size. To stabilize the training process in a large batch size setting, we develop the adaptive Column-wise Clipping (CowClip). It enables an easy and effective scaling rule for the embeddings, which keeps the learning rate unchanged and scales the L2 loss. We conduct extensive experiments with four CTR prediction networks on two real-world datasets and successfully scaled 128 times the original batch size without accuracy loss. In particular, for CTR prediction model DeepFM training on the Criteo dataset, our optimization framework enlarges the batch size from 1K to 128K with over 0.1% AUC improvement and reduces training time from 12 hours to 10 minutes on a single V100 GPU. Our code locates at https://github.com/bytedance/LargeBatchCTR.

Logical reasoning of text is an important ability that requires understanding the information present in the text, their interconnections, and then reasoning through them to infer new conclusions. Prior works on improving the logical reasoning ability of language models require complex processing of training data (e.g., aligning symbolic knowledge to text), yielding task-specific data augmentation solutions that restrict the learning of general logical reasoning skills. In this work, we propose APOLLO, an adaptively pretrained language model that has improved logical reasoning abilities. We select a subset of Wikipedia, based on a set of logical inference keywords, for continued pretraining of a language model. We use two self-supervised loss functions: a modified masked language modeling loss where only specific parts-of-speech words, that would likely require more reasoning than basic language understanding, are masked, and a sentence-level classification loss that teaches the model to distinguish between entailment and contradiction types of sentences. The proposed training paradigm is both simple and independent of task formats. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APOLLO by comparing it with prior baselines on two logical reasoning datasets. APOLLO performs comparably on ReClor and outperforms baselines on LogiQA.

We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 9 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark (DUE).

This paper focuses on analyzing and improving the commonsense ability of recent popular vision-language (VL) models. Despite the great success, we observe that existing VL-models still lack commonsense knowledge/reasoning ability (e.g., "Lemons are sour"), which is a vital component towards artificial general intelligence. Through our analysis, we find one important reason is that existing large-scale VL datasets do not contain much commonsense knowledge, which motivates us to improve the commonsense of VL-models from the data perspective. Rather than collecting a new VL training dataset, we propose a more scalable strategy, i.e., "Data Augmentation with kNowledge graph linearization for CommonsensE capability" (DANCE). It can be viewed as one type of data augmentation technique, which can inject commonsense knowledge into existing VL datasets on the fly during training. More specifically, we leverage the commonsense knowledge graph (e.g., ConceptNet) and create variants of text description in VL datasets via bidirectional sub-graph sequentialization. For better commonsense evaluation, we further propose the first retrieval-based commonsense diagnostic benchmark. By conducting extensive experiments on some representative VL-models, we demonstrate that our DANCE technique is able to significantly improve the commonsense ability while maintaining the performance on vanilla retrieval tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/pleaseconnectwifi/DANCE

The diverse demands of different summarization tasks and their high annotation costs are driving a need for few-shot summarization. However, despite the emergence of many summarization tasks and datasets, the current training paradigm for few-shot summarization systems ignores potentially shareable knowledge in heterogeneous datasets. To this end, we propose \textsc{UniSumm}, a unified few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarization tasks and can be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarization datasets. Meanwhile, to better evaluate few-shot summarization systems, under the principles of diversity and robustness, we assemble and publicize a new benchmark \textsc{SummZoo}. It consists of $8$ diverse summarization tasks with multiple sets of few-shot samples for each task, covering both monologue and dialogue domains. Experimental results and ablation studies show that \textsc{UniSumm} outperforms strong baseline systems by a large margin across all tasks in \textsc{SummZoo} under both automatic and human evaluations. We release our code and benchmark at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/UniSumm}.

Controllable summarization allows users to generate customized summaries with specified attributes. However, due to the lack of designated annotations of controlled summaries, existing works have to craft pseudo datasets by adapting generic summarization benchmarks. Furthermore, most research focuses on controlling single attributes individually (e.g., a short summary or a highly abstractive summary) rather than controlling a mix of attributes together (e.g., a short and highly abstractive summary). In this paper, we propose MACSum, the first human-annotated summarization dataset for controlling mixed attributes. It contains source texts from two domains, news articles and dialogues, with human-annotated summaries controlled by five designed attributes (Length, Extractiveness, Specificity, Topic, and Speaker). We propose two simple and effective parameter-efficient approaches for the new task of mixed controllable summarization based on hard prompt tuning and soft prefix tuning. Results and analysis demonstrate that hard prompt models yield the best performance on all metrics and human evaluations. However, mixed-attribute control is still challenging for summarization tasks. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/MACSum.

Contrastive Learning has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks. Many contrastive learning approaches use mined hard negatives to make batches more informative during training but these approaches are inefficient as they increase epoch length proportional to the number of mined negatives and require frequent updates of nearest neighbor indices or mining from recent batches. In this work, we provide an alternative to hard negative mining in supervised contrastive learning, Tail Batch Sampling (TBS), an efficient approximation to the batch assignment problem that upper bounds the gap between the global and training losses, $\mathcal{L}^{Global} - \mathcal{L}^{Train}$. TBS \textbf{improves state-of-the-art performance} in sentence embedding (+0.37 Spearman) and code-search tasks (+2.2\% MRR), is easy to implement - requiring only a few additional lines of code, does not maintain external data structures such as nearest neighbor indices, is more computationally efficient when compared to the most minimal hard negative mining approaches, and makes no changes to the model being trained.

Entities, as important carriers of real-world knowledge, play a key role in many NLP tasks. We focus on incorporating entity knowledge into an encoder-decoder framework for informative text generation. Existing approaches tried to index, retrieve, and read external documents as evidence, but they suffered from a large computational overhead. In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder framework with an entity memory, namely EDMem. The entity knowledge is stored in the memory as latent representations, and the memory is pre-trained on Wikipedia along with encoder-decoder parameters. To precisely generate entity names, we design three decoding methods to constrain entity generation by linking entities in the memory. EDMem is a unified framework that can be used on various entity-intensive question answering and generation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that EDMem outperforms both memory-based auto-encoder models and non-memory encoder-decoder models.

知识密集型任务，例如开放域问题答案（QA），需要访问大量的世界知识或领域知识。知识密集型任务的一种常见方法是采用检索到阅读的管道，该管道首先从诸如Wikipedia之类的外部语料库中检索少数相关的上下文文档，然后预测在检索文档的条件下得到答案。在本文中，我们提出了一种新的观点，可以通过用大型语言模型生成器代替文档检索器来解决知识密集型任务。我们称我们的方法生成-Read Read（GenRead），该方法首先提示大型语言模型根据给定问题生成上下文文档，然后读取生成的文档以产生最终答案。此外，我们提出了一种基于聚类的提示方法，该方法选择了不同的提示，从而产生了涵盖不同观点的生成文档，从而更好地回忆了可接受的答案。我们对三个不同的知识密集任务进行了广泛的实验，包括开放域质量检查，事实检查和对话系统。值得注意的是，GenRead在Triviaqa和WebQ上实现了71.6和54.4的精确匹配分数，显着超过了最先进的检索到+4.0和+3.9的最先进的dpr-fid，而无需从任何外部知识源中检索任何文档。最后，我们证明可以通过结合检索和生成来进一步提高模型性能。

完成知识三胞胎的任务具有广泛的下游应用程序。结构和语义信息在知识图完成中起着重要作用。与以前依靠知识图的结构或语义的方法不同，我们建议将语义共同嵌入知识三胞胎的自然语言描述及其结构信息。我们的方法通过对概率结构化损失进行微调预训练的语言模型来嵌入完成任务的知识图，其中语言模型的正向通过捕获语义和损失重建结构。我们对各种知识图基准的广泛实验证明了我们方法的最新性能。我们还表明，由于语义的更好使用，我们的方法可以显着提高低资源制度的性能。代码和数据集可在https://github.com/pkusjh/lass上找到。