Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language models requires a lot of training data, which is not available for African Languages. Active learning is a semi-supervised learning algorithm, in which a model consistently and dynamically learns to identify the most beneficial samples to train itself on, in order to achieve better optimization and performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, active learning effectively and practically addresses real-world data scarcity. Despite all its benefits, active learning, in the context of NLP and especially multilingual language models pretraining, has received little consideration. In this paper, we present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pretrained from scratch on 23 African languages (the largest effort to date) using our novel self-active learning framework. Pretrained on a dataset significantly (14x) smaller than existing baselines, AfroLM outperforms many multilingual pretrained language models (AfriBERTa, XLMR-base, mBERT) on various NLP downstream tasks (NER, text classification, and sentiment analysis). Additional out-of-domain sentiment analysis experiments show that \textbf{AfroLM} is able to generalize well across various domains. We release the code source, and our datasets used in our framework at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/MLM_AL.

Bayesian Inference offers principled tools to tackle many critical problems with modern neural networks such as poor calibration and generalization, and data inefficiency. However, scaling Bayesian inference to large architectures is challenging and requires restrictive approximations. Monte Carlo Dropout has been widely used as a relatively cheap way for approximate Inference and to estimate uncertainty with deep neural networks. Traditionally, the dropout mask is sampled independently from a fixed distribution. Recent works show that the dropout mask can be viewed as a latent variable, which can be inferred with variational inference. These methods face two important challenges: (a) the posterior distribution over masks can be highly multi-modal which can be difficult to approximate with standard variational inference and (b) it is not trivial to fully utilize sample-dependent information and correlation among dropout masks to improve posterior estimation. In this work, we propose GFlowOut to address these issues. GFlowOut leverages the recently proposed probabilistic framework of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to learn the posterior distribution over dropout masks. We empirically demonstrate that GFlowOut results in predictive distributions that generalize better to out-of-distribution data, and provide uncertainty estimates which lead to better performance in downstream tasks.

Bibletts是一种在撒哈拉以南非洲使用的十种语言的大型，高质量的开放语音数据集。该语料库包含每语言最多86个小时的对齐，工作室质量的48kHz单扬声器唱片，从而能够开发高质量的文本到语音模型。代表的十种语言是：Akuapem Twi，Asante Twi，Chichewa，Ewe，Hausa，Kikuyu，Lingala，Luganda，Luganda，Luo和Yoruba。该语料库是由Biblica的Open.Bible Project制作和发行的圣经录音的衍生作品。我们已经对齐，清洁和过滤了原始录音，并还对每种语言的对齐子进行了手工检查。我们为具有Coqui TTS的文本到语音模型提供了结果。数据是根据商业友好的CC-SA许可发布的。

语言模型预训练的最新进展利用大规模数据集创建多语言模型。但是，这些数据集中大多遗漏了低资源语言。这主要是因为网络上没有很好地表示口语，因此被排除在用于创建数据集的大规模爬网中。此外，这些模型的下游用户仅限于最初选择用于预训练的语言的选择。这项工作调查了如何最佳利用现有的预培训模型来为16种非洲语言创建低资源翻译系统。我们关注两个问题：1）如何将预训练的模型用于初始预培训中未包含的语言？ 2）生成的翻译模型如何有效地转移到新域？为了回答这些问题，我们创建了一个新的非洲新闻语料库，涵盖16种语言，其中8种语言不属于任何现有评估数据集的一部分。我们证明，将两种语言转移到其他语言和其他领域的最有效策略是，以少量的高质量翻译数据微调大型预训练模型。

在贝叶斯结构学习中，我们有兴趣从数据中推断出贝叶斯网络的定向无环图（DAG）结构。由于组合较大的样本空间，定义这种分布非常具有挑战性，并且通常需要基于MCMC的近似值。最近，已引入了一种新型的概率模型，称为生成流网络（GFLOWNETS），作为离散和复合对象（例如图形）生成建模的一般框架。在这项工作中，我们建议使用GFLOWNET作为MCMC的替代方案，以近似贝叶斯网络结构的后验分布，给定观测数据集。从该近似分布中生成样本DAG被视为一个顺序决策问题，在该问题中，该图是根据学习的过渡概率一次构造一个边缘的。通过对模拟和真实数据的评估，我们表明我们的方法称为dag-gflownet，可以准确地近似DAG，并且它可以与基于MCMC或变异推断的其他方法进行比较。

情感分析是NLP中研究最广泛的应用程序之一，但大多数工作都集中在具有大量数据的语言上。我们介绍了尼日利亚的四种口语最广泛的语言（Hausa，Igbo，Nigerian-Pidgin和Yor \'ub \'a）的第一个大规模的人类通知的Twitter情感数据集，该数据集由大约30,000个注释的推文组成（以及每种语言的大约30,000个）（以及14,000尼日利亚猎人），其中包括大量的代码混合推文。我们提出了文本收集，过滤，处理和标记方法，使我们能够为这些低资源语言创建数据集。我们评估了数据集上的预训练模型和转移策略。我们发现特定于语言的模型和语言适应性芬通常表现最好。我们将数据集，训练的模型，情感词典和代码释放到激励措施中，以代表性不足的语言进行情感分析。

Automatic music generation with artificial intelligence typically requires a large amount of data which is hard to obtain for many less common genres and musical instruments. To tackle this issue, we present ongoing work and preliminary findings on the possibility for deep models to transfer knowledge from language to music, by finetuning large language models pre-trained on a massive text corpus on only hundreds of MIDI files of drum performances. We show that by doing so, one of the largest, state-of-the-art models (GPT3) is capable of generating reasonable drum grooves, while models that are not pre-trained (Transformer) shows no such ability beyond naive repetition. Evaluating generated music is a challenging task, more so is evaluating drum grooves with little precedence in literature. Hence, we propose a tailored structural evaluation method and analyze drum grooves produced by GPT3 compared to those played by human professionals, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of such generation by language-to-music transfer. Our findings suggest that language-to-music transfer learning with large language models is viable and promising.

Many popular policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning follow a biased approximation of the policy gradient known as the discounted approximation. While it has been shown that the discounted approximation of the policy gradient is not the gradient of any objective function, little else is known about its convergence behavior or properties. In this paper, we show that if the discounted approximation is followed such that the discount factor is increased slowly at a rate related to a decreasing learning rate, the resulting method recovers the standard guarantees of gradient ascent on the undiscounted objective.

Traditionally, data analysis and theory have been viewed as separate disciplines, each feeding into fundamentally different types of models. Modern deep learning technology is beginning to unify these two disciplines and will produce a new class of predictively powerful space weather models that combine the physical insights gained by data and theory. We call on NASA to invest in the research and infrastructure necessary for the heliophysics' community to take advantage of these advances.