A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum, for abstractive opinion summarization. The summaries in this approach are built using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum achieves state-of-the-art performance in both settings.

Abstractive summarization has enjoyed renewed interest in recent years, thanks to pre-trained language models and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite promising results, current models still suffer from generating factually inconsistent summaries, reducing their utility for real-world application. Several recent efforts attempt to address this by devising models that automatically detect factual inconsistencies in machine generated summaries. However, they focus exclusively on English, a language with abundant resources. In this work, we leverage factual consistency evaluation models to improve multilingual summarization. We explore two intuitive approaches to mitigate hallucinations based on the signal provided by a multilingual NLI model, namely data filtering and controlled generation. Experimental results in the 45 languages from the XLSum dataset show gains over strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluation.

We consider the problem of automatically generating stories in multiple languages. Compared to prior work in monolingual story generation, crosslingual story generation allows for more universal research on story planning. We propose to use Prompting Large Language Models with Plans to study which plan is optimal for story generation. We consider 4 types of plans and systematically analyse how the outputs differ for different planning strategies. The study demonstrates that formulating the plans as question-answer pairs leads to more coherent generated stories while the plan gives more control to the story creators.

传达相关和忠实信息的能力对于有条件生成的许多任务至关重要，但对于神经SEQ-seq seq模型仍然难以捉摸，这些模型的输出通常显示出幻觉，并且无法正确涵盖重要细节。在这项工作中，我们主张规划作为有用的中间表示，以使有条件的一代减少不透明和扎根。我们的作品提出了将文本计划作为一系列提问（QA）对的新概念化。我们用QA蓝图作为内容选择（即〜说什么）和计划（即〜按什么顺序）来增强现有数据集（例如，用于摘要）。我们通过利用最先进的问题生成技术并将输入输出对自动获取蓝图，并将其转换为输入 - 蓝图输出输出元组。我们开发了基于变压器的模型，每个模型都在它们如何将蓝图合并到生成的输出中（例如，作为全局计划或迭代）。跨指标和数据集的评估表明，蓝图模型比不采取计划并允许对生成输出进行更严格控制的替代方案更为事实。

通常通过过去的选择来告知机器学习中的评估，例如要使用哪些数据集或指标。该标准化可以使用排行榜对平等基础进行比较，但是随着出现更好的替代方案，评估选择变得不佳。这个问题在自然语言生成中尤其相关，该语言需要不断改善的数据集，指标和人类评估以提出确定性的主张。为了使遵循最佳模型评估实践更加容易，我们介绍了GEMV2。新版本的一代，评估和指标基准为数据集，模型和指标开发人员提供了模块化基础架构，以使彼此受益。GEMV2支持40种记录的数据集中51种语言。所有数据集的模型都可以在线评估，我们的交互式数据卡创建和渲染工具使得在Living Benchmark中添加新数据集变得更加容易。

大型语言模型已被证明可以使用少量学习来实现各种自然语言任务的出色表现，这大大减少了将模型调整到特定应用程序所需的特定任务培训示例的数量。为了进一步了解量表对少量学习的影响，我们培训了一个5400亿个参数，密集激活的变压器语言模型，我们称之为“途径”语言模型棕榈。我们使用Pathways在6144 TPU V4芯片上训练了Palm，这是一种新的ML系统，可在多个TPU POD上进行高效的训练。我们通过在数百种语言理解和产生基准的基准方面实现最先进的学习结果来证明扩展的持续好处。在这些任务中，Palm 540B实现了突破性的表现，在一系列多步推理任务上表现出色，超过了最新的最新表现，并且在最近发布的Big Benchmark上表现优于平均人类表现。大量的大型基础任务显示出与模型量表的不连续改进，这意味着当我们扩展到最大模型时，性能急剧增加。 Palm在多语言任务和源代码生成方面也具有很强的功能，我们在各种基准测试中证明了这一点。我们还提供了有关偏见和毒性的全面分析，并研究了训练数据记忆的程度，相对于模型量表。最后，我们讨论与大语言模型有关的道德考虑，并讨论潜在的缓解策略。

Understanding the relationship between structure and sentiment is essential in highlighting future operations with online social networks. More specifically, within popular conversation on Twitter. This paper provides a development on the relationship between the two variables: structure, defined as the composition of a directed network, and sentiment, a quantified value of the positive/negative connotations of a conversation. We highlight thread sentiment to be inversely proportional to the strength and connectivity of a network. The second portion of this paper highlights differences in query types, specifically how the aforementioned behavior differs within four key query types. This paper focuses on topical, event-based, geographic, and individual queries as orientations which have differing behavior. Using cross-query analysis, we see that the relationship between structure and sentiment, though still inversely proportional, differs greatly across query types. We find this relationship to be the most clear within the individual queries and the least prevalent within the event-based queries. This paper provides a sociological progression in our understanding of opinion and networks, while providing a methodological advancement for future studies on similar subjects.

We present temporally layered architecture (TLA), a biologically inspired system for temporally adaptive distributed control. TLA layers a fast and a slow controller together to achieve temporal abstraction that allows each layer to focus on a different time-scale. Our design is biologically inspired and draws on the architecture of the human brain which executes actions at different timescales depending on the environment's demands. Such distributed control design is widespread across biological systems because it increases survivability and accuracy in certain and uncertain environments. We demonstrate that TLA can provide many advantages over existing approaches, including persistent exploration, adaptive control, explainable temporal behavior, compute efficiency and distributed control. We present two different algorithms for training TLA: (a) Closed-loop control, where the fast controller is trained over a pre-trained slow controller, allowing better exploration for the fast controller and closed-loop control where the fast controller decides whether to "act-or-not" at each timestep; and (b) Partially open loop control, where the slow controller is trained over a pre-trained fast controller, allowing for open loop-control where the slow controller picks a temporally extended action or defers the next n-actions to the fast controller. We evaluated our method on a suite of continuous control tasks and demonstrate the advantages of TLA over several strong baselines.

Data deprivation, or the lack of easily available and actionable information on the well-being of individuals, is a significant challenge for the developing world and an impediment to the design and operationalization of policies intended to alleviate poverty. In this paper we explore the suitability of data derived from OpenStreetMap to proxy for the location of two crucial public services: schools and health clinics. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of digital humanitarians, online mapping repositories such as OpenStreetMap contain millions of records on buildings and other structures, delineating both their location and often their use. Unfortunately much of this data is locked in complex, unstructured text rendering it seemingly unsuitable for classifying schools or clinics. We apply a scalable, unsupervised learning method to unlabeled OpenStreetMap building data to extract the location of schools and health clinics in ten countries in Africa. We find the topic modeling approach greatly improves performance versus reliance on structured keys alone. We validate our results by comparing schools and clinics identified by our OSM method versus those identified by the WHO, and describe OSM coverage gaps more broadly.

We present a new algorithm for automatically bounding the Taylor remainder series. In the special case of a scalar function $f: \mathbb{R} \mapsto \mathbb{R}$, our algorithm takes as input a reference point $x_0$, trust region $[a, b]$, and integer $k \ge 0$, and returns an interval $I$ such that $f(x) - \sum_{i=0}^k \frac {f^{(i)}(x_0)} {i!} (x - x_0)^i \in I (x - x_0)^{k+1}$ for all $x \in [a, b]$. As in automatic differentiation, the function $f$ is provided to the algorithm in symbolic form, and must be composed of known elementary functions. At a high level, our algorithm has two steps. First, for a variety of commonly-used elementary functions (e.g., $\exp$, $\log$), we derive sharp polynomial upper and lower bounds on the Taylor remainder series. We then recursively combine the bounds for the elementary functions using an interval arithmetic variant of Taylor-mode automatic differentiation. Our algorithm can make efficient use of machine learning hardware accelerators, and we provide an open source implementation in JAX. We then turn our attention to applications. Most notably, we use our new machinery to create the first universal majorization-minimization optimization algorithms: algorithms that iteratively minimize an arbitrary loss using a majorizer that is derived automatically, rather than by hand. Applied to machine learning, this leads to architecture-specific optimizers for training deep networks that converge from any starting point, without hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that for some optimization problems, these hyperparameter-free optimizers outperform tuned versions of gradient descent, Adam, and AdaGrad. We also show that our automatically-derived bounds can be used for verified global optimization and numerical integration, and to prove sharper versions of Jensen's inequality.