Recent pre-trained language models have shown promising capabilities in generating fluent and realistic natural language text. However, generating multi-sentence text with global content planning has been a long-existing research question. Current approaches for controlled text generation can hardly address this issue, as they usually condition on single known control attributes. In this study, we propose a low-cost yet effective framework which explicitly models the global content plan of the generated text. Specifically, it optimizes the joint distribution of the natural language sequence and the global content plan in a plug-and-play manner. We conduct extensive experiments on the well-established Recipe1M+ benchmark. Both automatic and human evaluations verify that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the task of recipe generation

Open-ended text generation with autoregressive language models (LMs) is one of the core tasks in natural language processing. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g., greedy/beam search) often lead to the degeneration problem, i.e., the generated text is unnatural and contains undesirable repetitions. Existing solutions to this problem either introduce randomness prone to incoherence or require a look-ahead mechanism that demands extra computational overhead. In this study, we formulate open-ended text generation from a new perspective, i.e., we view it as an exploration process within a directed graph. Thereby, we understand the phenomenon of degeneration as circular loops within the directed graph. Based on our formulation, we propose a novel decoding method -- \textit{momentum decoding} -- which encourages the LM to \textit{greedily} explore new nodes outside the current graph. Meanwhile, it also allows the LM to return to the existing nodes with a momentum downgraded by a pre-defined resistance function. We extensively test our approach on three benchmarks from different domains through automatic and human evaluations. The results show that momentum decoding performs comparably with the current state of the art while enjoying notably improved inference speed and computation FLOPs. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis to reveal the merits and inner workings of our approach. Our codes and other related resources are publicly available at https://github.com/gmftbyGMFTBY/MomentumDecoding.

搜索会话中的上下文信息对于捕获用户的搜索意图很重要。已经提出了各种方法来对用户行为序列进行建模，以改善会话中的文档排名。通常，（搜索上下文，文档）对的训练样本在每个训练时期随机采样。实际上，了解用户的搜索意图和判断文档的相关性的困难从一个搜索上下文到另一个搜索上下文有很大差异。混合不同困难的训练样本可能会使模型的优化过程感到困惑。在这项工作中，我们为上下文感知文档排名提出了一个课程学习框架，其中排名模型以易于恐惧的方式学习搜索上下文和候选文档之间的匹配信号。这样一来，我们旨在将模型逐渐指向全球最佳。为了利用正面和负面示例，设计了两个课程。两个真实查询日志数据集的实验表明，我们提出的框架可以显着提高几种现有方法的性能，从而证明课程学习对上下文感知文档排名的有效性。

文本生成对于许多自然语言处理应用至关重要。然而，基于最大化的解码方法（例如，神经语言模型的光束搜索）通常会导致解析解决方案 - 生成的文本是不自然的，并且包含不良的重复。现有方法通过采样或修改训练目标引入随机性，以降低某些令牌的概率（例如，不可能训练）。但是，它们通常会导致缺乏连贯性的解决方案。在这项工作中，我们表明，模型变性的根本原因是令牌表示的各向异性分布。我们提出了一种对比解决方案：（i）SIMCTG，是校准模型表示空间的对比训练目标，以及（ii）一种解码方法 - 对比度搜索 - 以鼓励多样性，同时在生成的文本中保持连贯性。对两种语言的三个基准测试的广泛实验和分析表明，我们提出的方法显着优于人类和自动指标评估的当前最新文本生成方法。

屏蔽语言模型（MLMS），如BERT和ROBERTA，在过去几年中彻底改变了自然语言理解领域。然而，现有的预先训练的MLMS通常输出令牌表示的各向异性分布，其占据整个表示空间的窄子集。这些令牌表示不理想，特别是对于要求不同令牌的判别语义含义的任务。在这项工作中，我们提出了TACL（令牌感知的对比学习），这是一种新的持续预训练方法，鼓励伯特来学习令牌陈述的各向同性和鉴别分布。TACL完全无监督，无需其他数据。我们在广泛的英语和中国基准上广泛地测试了我们的方法。结果表明，TACL通过原始BERT模型带来一致和显着的改进。此外，我们进行了详细的分析，以揭示我们方法的优点和内在运作。

Exploiting rich linguistic information in raw text is crucial for expressive text-to-speech (TTS). As large scale pre-trained text representation develops, bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) has been proven to embody semantic information and employed to TTS recently. However, original or simply fine-tuned BERT embeddings still cannot provide sufficient semantic knowledge that expressive TTS models should take into account. In this paper, we propose a word-level semantic representation enhancing method based on dependency structure and pre-trained BERT embedding. The BERT embedding of each word is reprocessed considering its specific dependencies and related words in the sentence, to generate more effective semantic representation for TTS. To better utilize the dependency structure, relational gated graph network (RGGN) is introduced to make semantic information flow and aggregate through the dependency structure. The experimental results show that the proposed method can further improve the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized speeches on both Mandarin and English datasets.

An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders -- respected allies and opposed bogeymen -- across U.S. political ideologies.

While inferring common actor states (such as position or velocity) is an important and well-explored task of the perception system aboard a self-driving vehicle (SDV), it may not always provide sufficient information to the SDV. This is especially true in the case of active emergency vehicles (EVs), where light-based signals also need to be captured to provide a full context. We consider this problem and propose a sequential methodology for the detection of active EVs, using an off-the-shelf CNN model operating at a frame level and a downstream smoother that accounts for the temporal aspect of flashing EV lights. We also explore model improvements through data augmentation and training with additional hard samples.

A key feature of federated learning (FL) is to preserve the data privacy of end users. However, there still exist potential privacy leakage in exchanging gradients under FL. As a result, recent research often explores the differential privacy (DP) approaches to add noises to the computing results to address privacy concerns with low overheads, which however degrade the model performance. In this paper, we strike the balance of data privacy and efficiency by utilizing the pervasive social connections between users. Specifically, we propose SCFL, a novel Social-aware Clustered Federated Learning scheme, where mutually trusted individuals can freely form a social cluster and aggregate their raw model updates (e.g., gradients) inside each cluster before uploading to the cloud for global aggregation. By mixing model updates in a social group, adversaries can only eavesdrop the social-layer combined results, but not the privacy of individuals. We unfold the design of SCFL in three steps. \emph{i) Stable social cluster formation. Considering users' heterogeneous training samples and data distributions, we formulate the optimal social cluster formation problem as a federation game and devise a fair revenue allocation mechanism to resist free-riders. ii) Differentiated trust-privacy mapping}. For the clusters with low mutual trust, we design a customizable privacy preservation mechanism to adaptively sanitize participants' model updates depending on social trust degrees. iii) Distributed convergence}. A distributed two-sided matching algorithm is devised to attain an optimized disjoint partition with Nash-stable convergence. Experiments on Facebook network and MNIST/CIFAR-10 datasets validate that our SCFL can effectively enhance learning utility, improve user payoff, and enforce customizable privacy protection.