The post-training quantization (PTQ) challenge of bringing quantized neural net accuracy close to original has drawn much attention driven by industry demand. Many of the methods emphasize optimization of a specific degree-of-freedom (DoF), such as quantization step size, preconditioning factors, bias fixing, often chained to others in multi-step solutions. Here we rethink quantized network parameterization in HW-aware fashion, towards a unified analysis of all quantization DoF, permitting for the first time their joint end-to-end finetuning. Our single-step simple and extendable method, dubbed quantization-aware finetuning (QFT), achieves 4-bit weight quantization results on-par with SoTA within PTQ constraints of speed and resource.

As the accuracy of machine learning models increases at a fast rate, so does their demand for energy and compute resources. On a low level, the major part of these resources is consumed by data movement between different memory units. Modern hardware architectures contain a form of fast memory (e.g., cache, registers), which is small, and a slow memory (e.g., DRAM), which is larger but expensive to access. We can only process data that is stored in fast memory, which incurs data movement (input/output-operations, or I/Os) between the two units. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of the I/Os needed in sparse feedforward neural network (FFNN) inference. We establish bounds that determine the optimal number of I/Os up to a factor of 2 and present a method that uses a number of I/Os within that range. Much of the I/O-complexity is determined by a few high-level properties of the FFNN (number of inputs, outputs, neurons, and connections), but if we want to get closer to the exact lower bound, the instance-specific sparsity patterns need to be considered. Departing from the 2-optimal computation strategy, we show how to reduce the number of I/Os further with simulated annealing. Complementing this result, we provide an algorithm that constructively generates networks with maximum I/O-efficiency for inference. We test the algorithms and empirically verify our theoretical and algorithmic contributions. In our experiments on real hardware we observe speedups of up to 45$\times$ relative to the standard way of performing inference.

Classical methods for acoustic scene mapping require the estimation of time difference of arrival (TDOA) between microphones. Unfortunately, TDOA estimation is very sensitive to reverberation and additive noise. We introduce an unsupervised data-driven approach that exploits the natural structure of the data. Our method builds upon local conformal autoencoders (LOCA) - an offline deep learning scheme for learning standardized data coordinates from measurements. Our experimental setup includes a microphone array that measures the transmitted sound source at multiple locations across the acoustic enclosure. We demonstrate that LOCA learns a representation that is isometric to the spatial locations of the microphones. The performance of our method is evaluated using a series of realistic simulations and compared with other dimensionality-reduction schemes. We further assess the influence of reverberation on the results of LOCA and show that it demonstrates considerable robustness.

Prior works on improving speech quality with visual input typically study each type of auditory distortion separately (e.g., separation, inpainting, video-to-speech) and present tailored algorithms. This paper proposes to unify these subjects and study Generalized Speech Enhancement, where the goal is not to reconstruct the exact reference clean signal, but to focus on improving certain aspects of speech. In particular, this paper concerns intelligibility, quality, and video synchronization. We cast the problem as audio-visual speech resynthesis, which is composed of two steps: pseudo audio-visual speech recognition (P-AVSR) and pseudo text-to-speech synthesis (P-TTS). P-AVSR and P-TTS are connected by discrete units derived from a self-supervised speech model. Moreover, we utilize self-supervised audio-visual speech model to initialize P-AVSR. The proposed model is coined ReVISE. ReVISE is the first high-quality model for in-the-wild video-to-speech synthesis and achieves superior performance on all LRS3 audio-visual enhancement tasks with a single model. To demonstrates its applicability in the real world, ReVISE is also evaluated on EasyCom, an audio-visual benchmark collected under challenging acoustic conditions with only 1.6 hours of training data. Similarly, ReVISE greatly suppresses noise and improves quality. Project page: https://wnhsu.github.io/ReVISE.

Human linguistic capacity is often characterized by compositionality and the generalization it enables -- human learners can produce and comprehend novel complex expressions by composing known parts. Several benchmarks exploit distributional control across training and test to gauge compositional generalization, where certain lexical items only occur in limited contexts during training. While recent work using these benchmarks suggests that pretrained models achieve impressive generalization performance, we argue that exposure to pretraining data may break the aforementioned distributional control. Using the COGS benchmark of Kim and Linzen (2020), we test two modified evaluation setups that control for this issue: (1) substituting context-controlled lexical items with novel character sequences, and (2) substituting them with special tokens represented by novel embeddings. We find that both of these setups lead to lower generalization performance in T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), suggesting that previously reported results have been overestimated due to uncontrolled lexical exposure during pretraining. The performance degradation is more extreme with novel embeddings, and the degradation increases with the amount of pretraining data, highlighting an interesting case of inverse scaling.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 35K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.

Recent work attributes progress in NLP to large language models (LMs) with increased model size and large quantities of pretraining data. Despite this, current state-of-the-art LMs for Hebrew are both under-parameterized and under-trained compared to LMs in other languages. Additionally, previous work on pretrained Hebrew LMs focused on encoder-only models. While the encoder-only architecture is beneficial for classification tasks, it does not cater well for sub-word prediction tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition, when considering the morphologically rich nature of Hebrew. In this paper we argue that sequence-to-sequence generative architectures are more suitable for LLMs in the case of morphologically rich languages (MRLs) such as Hebrew. We demonstrate that by casting tasks in the Hebrew NLP pipeline as text-to-text tasks, we can leverage powerful multilingual, pretrained sequence-to-sequence models as mT5, eliminating the need for a specialized, morpheme-based, separately fine-tuned decoder. Using this approach, our experiments show substantial improvements over previously published results on existing Hebrew NLP benchmarks. These results suggest that multilingual sequence-to-sequence models present a promising building block for NLP for MRLs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results across a variety of tasks while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial for both system developers and users in this setting. We propose and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We develop a reproducable evaluation framework for the task, using human annotations as a gold standard and a correlated automatic metric that we show is suitable for development settings. We describe and benchmark a broad set of architectures for the task. Our contributions give some concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third key question (How to build LLMs with attribution?).

Spurious correlations in training data often lead to robustness issues since models learn to use them as shortcuts. For example, when predicting whether an object is a cow, a model might learn to rely on its green background, so it would do poorly on a cow on a sandy background. A standard dataset for measuring state-of-the-art on methods mitigating this problem is Waterbirds. The best method (Group Distributionally Robust Optimization - GroupDRO) currently achieves 89\% worst group accuracy and standard training from scratch on raw images only gets 72\%. GroupDRO requires training a model in an end-to-end manner with subgroup labels. In this paper, we show that we can achieve up to 90\% accuracy without using any sub-group information in the training set by simply using embeddings from a large pre-trained vision model extractor and training a linear classifier on top of it. With experiments on a wide range of pre-trained models and pre-training datasets, we show that the capacity of the pre-training model and the size of the pre-training dataset matters. Our experiments reveal that high capacity vision transformers perform better compared to high capacity convolutional neural networks, and larger pre-training dataset leads to better worst-group accuracy on the spurious correlation dataset.

Machine learning models have been found to learn shortcuts -- unintended decision rules that are unable to generalize -- undermining models' reliability. Previous works address this problem under the tenuous assumption that only a single shortcut exists in the training data. Real-world images are rife with multiple visual cues from background to texture. Key to advancing the reliability of vision systems is understanding whether existing methods can overcome multiple shortcuts or struggle in a Whac-A-Mole game, i.e., where mitigating one shortcut amplifies reliance on others. To address this shortcoming, we propose two benchmarks: 1) UrbanCars, a dataset with precisely controlled spurious cues, and 2) ImageNet-W, an evaluation set based on ImageNet for watermark, a shortcut we discovered affects nearly every modern vision model. Along with texture and background, ImageNet-W allows us to study multiple shortcuts emerging from training on natural images. We find computer vision models, including large foundation models -- regardless of training set, architecture, and supervision -- struggle when multiple shortcuts are present. Even methods explicitly designed to combat shortcuts struggle in a Whac-A-Mole dilemma. To tackle this challenge, we propose Last Layer Ensemble, a simple-yet-effective method to mitigate multiple shortcuts without Whac-A-Mole behavior. Our results surface multi-shortcut mitigation as an overlooked challenge critical to advancing the reliability of vision systems. The datasets and code are released: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Whac-A-Mole.git.