Disentangled representation learning remains challenging as ground truth factors of variation do not naturally exist. To address this, we present Vocabulary Disentanglement Retrieval~(VDR), a simple yet effective retrieval-based disentanglement framework that leverages nature language as distant supervision. Our approach is built upon the widely-used bi-encoder architecture with disentanglement heads and is trained on data-text pairs that are readily available on the web or in existing datasets. This makes our approach task- and modality-agnostic with potential for a wide range of downstream applications. We conduct experiments on 16 datasets in both text-to-text and cross-modal scenarios and evaluate VDR in a zero-shot setting. With the incorporation of disentanglement heads and a minor increase in parameters, VDR achieves significant improvements over the base retriever it is built upon, with a 9% higher on NDCG@10 scores in zero-shot text-to-text retrieval and an average of 13% higher recall in cross-modal retrieval. In comparison to other baselines, VDR outperforms them in most tasks, while also improving explainability and efficiency.

Recently, domain-specific PLMs have been proposed to boost the task performance of specific domains (e.g., biomedical and computer science) by continuing to pre-train general PLMs with domain-specific corpora. However, this Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT; Gururangan et al. (2020)) tends to forget the previous general knowledge acquired by general PLMs, which leads to a catastrophic forgetting phenomenon and sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new framework of General Memory Augmented Pre-trained Language Model (G-MAP), which augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory representation built from the frozen general PLM without losing any general knowledge. Specifically, we propose a new memory-augmented layer, and based on it, different augmented strategies are explored to build the memory representation and then adaptively fuse it into the domain-specific PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of G-MAP on various domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and different kinds (text classification, QA, NER) of tasks, and the extensive results show that the proposed G-MAP can achieve SOTA results on all tasks.

旨在为通用机器人铺平道路的边界研究，视觉和语言导航（VLN）一直是计算机视觉和自然语言处理社区的热门话题。 VLN任务要求代理在不熟悉的环境中按照自然语言说明导航到目标位置。最近，基于变压器的模型已在VLN任务上获得了重大改进。由于变压器体系结构中的注意力机制可以更好地整合视觉和语言的模式内和模式信息。但是，当前基于变压器的模型中存在两个问题。 1）模型独立处理每个视图，而无需考虑对象的完整性。 2）在视觉模态的自我注意操作期间，在空间上遥远的视图可以彼此交织而无需明确的限制。这种混合可能会引入额外的噪音而不是有用的信息。为了解决这些问题，我们建议1）基于插槽注意的模块，以合并来自同一对象的分割的信息。 2）局部注意力掩模机制限制视觉注意力跨度。所提出的模块可以轻松地插入任何VLN体系结构中，我们将复发的VLN-Bert用作基本模型。 R2R数据集的实验表明，我们的模型已达到最新结果。

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive, so it is difficult to efficiently execute them on resourcerestricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we first propose a novel Transformer distillation method that is specially designed for knowledge distillation (KD) of the Transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large "teacher" BERT can be effectively transferred to a small "student" Tiny-BERT. Then, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs Transformer distillation at both the pretraining and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture the general-domain as well as the task-specific knowledge in BERT. TinyBERT 41 with 4 layers is empirically effective and achieves more than 96.8% the performance of its teacher BERT BASE on GLUE benchmark, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT 4 is also significantly better than 4-layer state-of-the-art baselines on BERT distillation, with only ∼28% parameters and ∼31% inference time of them. Moreover, TinyBERT 6 with 6 layers performs on-par with its teacher BERT BASE .

Large pretrained language models can easily produce toxic or biased content, which is prohibitive for practical use. In order to detect such toxic generations, existing methods rely on templates, real-world data extraction, crowdsourcing workers, or automatic generation to construct adversarial contexts that are likely to induce toxic generations. However, what type of context is more likely to induce unsafe responses is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify that context toxicity and context category (e.g., \textit{profanity}, \textit{insult}, \textit{drugs}, etc.) are two important factors to cause safety issues in response generation. Hence, we propose a method called \emph{reverse generation} to construct adversarial contexts conditioned on a given response, with the flexibility to control category, toxicity level, and inductivity of the generated contexts. Via reverse generation, we augment the existing BAD dataset and construct a new dataset BAD+ which contains more than 120K diverse and highly inductive contexts in 12 categories. We test three popular pretrained dialogue models (Blender, DialoGPT, and Plato2) and find that BAD+ can largely expose their safety problems. Furthermore, we show that BAD+ can greatly enhance the safety of generation and reveal the key factors of safety improvement. Our code and dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/thu-coai/Reverse_Generation}.

With the fast development of Machine Translation (MT) systems, especially the new boost from Neural MT (NMT) models, the MT output quality has reached a new level of accuracy. However, many researchers criticised that the current popular evaluation metrics such as BLEU can not correctly distinguish the state-of-the-art NMT systems regarding quality differences. In this short paper, we describe the design and implementation of a linguistically motivated human-in-the-loop evaluation metric looking into idiomatic and terminological Multi-word Expressions (MWEs). MWEs have played a bottleneck in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including MT. MWEs can be used as one of the main factors to distinguish different MT systems by looking into their capabilities in recognising and translating MWEs in an accurate and meaning equivalent manner.

To accomplish punctuation restoration, most existing methods focus on introducing extra information (e.g., part-of-speech) or addressing the class imbalance problem. Recently, large-scale transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMS) have been utilized widely and obtained remarkable success. However, the PLMS are trained on the large dataset with marks, which may not fit well with the small dataset without marks, causing the convergence to be not ideal. In this study, we propose a Feature Fusion two-stream framework (FF2) to bridge the gap. Specifically, one stream leverages a pre-trained language model to capture the semantic feature, while another auxiliary module captures the feature at hand. We also modify the computation of multi-head attention to encourage communication among heads. Then, two features with different perspectives are aggregated to fuse information and enhance context awareness. Without additional data, the experimental results on the popular benchmark IWSLT demonstrate that FF2 achieves new SOTA performance, which verifies that our approach is effective.

Current natural language processing (NLP) models such as BERT and RoBERTa have achieved high overall performance, but they often make systematic errors due to bias or certain difficult features to learn. Thus research on slice detection models (SDM) which automatically identifies underperforming groups of datapoints has gradually caught more attention, which aims at both understanding model behaviors and providing insights for future model training and designing. However, there is little systematic research on SDM and quantitative evaluation of its assessment for NLP models. Our paper fills this gap by proposing "Discover, Explanation, Improvement" framework that discovers coherent and underperforming groups of datapoints and unites datapoints of each slice under human-understandable concepts; it also provides comprehensive evaluation tasks and the corresponding quantitative metrics, which enable convenient comparison for future works. Results show that our framework can accurately select error-prone datapoints with informative semantic features that summarize error patterns, based on which it directly boosts model performance by an average of 2.85 points based on trained models without tuning any parameters across multiple datasets.

In this paper, we take a first step towards answering the question of how to design fair machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks. Using a minimax framework, we aim to design an adversarially robust fair regression model that achieves optimal performance in the presence of an attacker who is able to add a carefully designed adversarial data point to the dataset or perform a rank-one attack on the dataset. By solving the proposed nonsmooth nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problem, the optimal adversary as well as the robust fairness-aware regression model are obtained. For both synthetic data and real-world datasets, numerical results illustrate that the proposed adversarially robust fair models have better performance on poisoned datasets than other fair machine learning models in both prediction accuracy and group-based fairness measure.

多机器人覆盖计划问题的集中式方法缺乏可扩展性。基于学习的分布式算法除了将面向数据的功能生成功能带入表格外，还提供了可扩展的途径，从而允许与其他基于学习的方法集成。为此，我们提出了一个基于学习的，可区分的分布式覆盖范围计划（D2COPL A N），该计划者与专家算法相比在运行时和代理数量上有效地扩展，并与经典分布式算法相同。此外，我们表明D2Coplan可以与其他学习方法无缝地结合到端到端的学习方法，从而提供了比单独训练的模块更好的解决方案，从而打开了进一步的研究，以进一步研究以经典方法难以捉摸的任务。