This paper presents ReasonFormer, a unified reasoning framework for mirroring the modular and compositional reasoning process of humans in complex decision-making. Inspired by dual-process theory in cognitive science, the representation module (automatic thinking) and reasoning modules (controlled thinking) are decoupled to capture different levels of cognition. Upon the top of the representation module, the pre-trained reasoning modules are modular and professional in specific and fundamental reasoning skills (e.g., logic, simple QA, etc). To mimic the controlled compositional thinking process, different reasoning modules are dynamically activated and composed in both parallel and cascaded manners to control what reasoning skills are activated and how deep the reasoning process will be reached to solve the current problems. The unified reasoning framework solves multiple tasks with a single model, and is trained and inferred in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on 11 datasets requiring different reasoning skills and complexity, ReasonFormer demonstrates substantial performance boosts, revealing the compositional reasoning ability. Few-shot experiments exhibit better generalization ability by learning to compose pre-trained skills for new tasks with limited data, and decoupling the representation module and the reasoning modules. Further analysis shows the modularity of reasoning modules as different tasks activate distinct reasoning skills at different reasoning depths.

任务概括是自然语言处理（NLP）的漫长挑战。最近的研究试图通过将NLP任务映射到人类可读的提示形式中来提高预训练语言模型的任务概括能力。但是，这些方法需要费力且不灵活的提示，并且在同一下游任务上的不同提示可能会获得不稳定的性能。我们提出了统一的架构提示，这是一种灵活且可扩展的提示方法，该方法会根据任务输入架构自动自动自定义每个任务的可学习提示。它在任务之间建模共享知识，同时保持不同任务架构的特征，从而增强任务概括能力。架构提示采用每个任务的明确数据结构，以制定提示，因此涉及几乎没有人类的努力。为了测试模式提示的任务概括能力，我们对各种一般NLP任务进行基于模式提示的多任务预训练。该框架在从8种任务类型（例如QA，NLI等）的16个看不见的下游任务上实现了强劲的零射击和很少的概括性能。此外，全面的分析证明了每个组件在架构提示中的有效性，其在任务组成性方面的灵活性以及在全DATA微调设置下提高性能的能力。

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for wider applications. To address this issue, we present ProQA, a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. ProQA takes a unified structural prompt as the bridge and improves the QA-centric ability by structural prompt-based pre-training. Through a structurally designed prompt-based input schema, ProQA concurrently models the knowledge generalization for all QA tasks while keeping the knowledge customization for every specific QA task. Furthermore, ProQA is pre-trained with structural prompt-formatted large-scale synthesized corpus, which empowers the model with the commonly-required QA ability. Experimental results on 11 QA benchmarks demonstrate that ProQA consistently boosts performance on both full data fine-tuning, few-shot learning, and zero-shot testing scenarios. Furthermore, ProQA exhibits strong ability in both continual learning and transfer learning by taking the advantages of the structural prompt.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been revolutionized by the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT. Despite setting new records in nearly every NLP task, PLMs still face a number of challenges including poor interpretability, weak reasoning capability, and the need for a lot of expensive annotated data when applied to downstream tasks. By integrating external knowledge into PLMs, \textit{\underline{K}nowledge-\underline{E}nhanced \underline{P}re-trained \underline{L}anguage \underline{M}odels} (KEPLMs) have the potential to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In this paper, we examine KEPLMs systematically through a series of studies. Specifically, we outline the common types and different formats of knowledge to be integrated into KEPLMs, detail the existing methods for building and evaluating KEPLMS, present the applications of KEPLMs in downstream tasks, and discuss the future research directions. Researchers will benefit from this survey by gaining a quick and comprehensive overview of the latest developments in this field.

We present LogiGAN, an unsupervised adversarial pre-training framework for improving logical reasoning abilities of language models. Upon automatic identifying logical reasoning phenomena in massive text corpus via detection heuristics, we train language models to predict the masked-out logical statements. Inspired by the facilitation effect of reflective thinking in human learning, we analogically simulate the learning-thinking process with an adversarial Generator-Verifier architecture to assist logic learning. LogiGAN implements a novel sequential GAN approach that (a) circumvents the non-differentiable challenge of the sequential GAN by leveraging the Generator as a sentence-level generative likelihood scorer with a learning objective of reaching scoring consensus with the Verifier; (b) is computationally feasible for large-scale pre-training with arbitrary target length. Both base and large size language models pre-trained with LogiGAN demonstrate obvious performance improvement on 12 datasets requiring general reasoning abilities, revealing the fundamental role of logic in broad reasoning, as well as the effectiveness of LogiGAN. Ablation studies on LogiGAN components reveal the relative orthogonality between linguistic and logic abilities and suggest that reflective thinking's facilitation effect might also generalize to machine learning.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can adapt large language models to downstream tasks by training a small amount of newly added parameters. In multi-task settings, PEFT adapters typically train on each task independently, inhibiting transfer across tasks, or on the concatenation of all tasks, which can lead to negative interference. To address this, Polytropon (Ponti et al.) jointly learns an inventory of PEFT adapters and a routing function to share variable-size sets of adapters across tasks. Subsequently, adapters can be re-combined and fine-tuned on novel tasks even with limited data. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the ability to control which adapters are active for each task leads to sample-efficient generalization. Thus, we propose less expressive variants where we perform weighted averaging of the adapters before few-shot adaptation (Poly-mu) instead of learning a routing function. Moreover, we introduce more expressive variants where finer-grained task-adapter allocation is learned through a multi-head routing function (Poly-S). We test these variants on three separate benchmarks for multi-task learning. We find that Poly-S achieves gains on all three (up to 5.3 points on average) over strong baselines, while incurring a negligible additional cost in parameter count. In particular, we find that instruction tuning, where models are fully fine-tuned on natural language instructions for each task, is inferior to modular methods such as Polytropon and our proposed variants.

This work introduces a new multi-task, parameter-efficient language model (LM) tuning method that learns to transfer knowledge across different tasks via a mixture of soft prompts-small prefix embedding vectors pre-trained for different tasks. Our method, called ATTEMPT (ATTEntional Mixtures of Prompt Tuning), obtains source prompts as encodings of large-scale source tasks into a small number of parameters and trains an attention module to interpolate the source prompts and a newly initialized target prompt for every instance in the target task. During training, only the target task prompt and the attention weights, which are shared between tasks in multi-task training, are updated, while the original LM and source prompts are intact. ATTEMPT is highly parameter-efficient (e.g., updates 2,300 times fewer parameters than full fine-tuning) while achieving high task performance using knowledge from high-resource tasks. Moreover, it is modular using pre-trained soft prompts, and can flexibly add or remove source prompts for effective knowledge transfer. Our experimental results across 21 diverse NLP datasets show that ATTEMPT significantly outperforms prompt tuning and outperforms or matches fully fine-tuned or other parameter-efficient tuning approaches that use over ten times more parameters. Finally, ATTEMPT outperforms previous work in few-shot learning settings.

广义文本表示是许多自然语言理解任务的基础。要充分利用不同的语料库，不可避免地需要了解它们之间的相关性。但是，许多方法忽略了相关性，并直接用于所有任务的单通道模型（粗糙的范式），这缺乏足够的理性和解释。此外，一些现有的作品通过针迹技能块（一个精细的范式）学习下游任务，这可能会导致其冗余和噪音，从而导致非理性。在这项工作中，我们首先通过三种不同的观点分析任务相关性，即数据属性，手动设计和基于模型的相关性，基于相似的任务被分组在一起。然后，我们提出了一个用粗到细范式的层次结构框架，其最底层共享了所有任务，中层级别分为不同的组，以及分配给每个任务的顶级级别。这使我们的模型可以从所有任务中学习基本的语言属性，提高相关任务的性能，并减少不相关任务的负面影响。我们在五个自然语言理解任务的13个基准数据集上进行的实验证明了我们方法的优势。

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) which are trained on large text corpus through the self-supervised learning method, have yielded promising performance on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, though PLMs with huge parameters can effectively possess rich knowledge learned from massive training text and benefit downstream tasks at the fine-tuning stage, they still have some limitations such as poor reasoning ability due to the lack of external knowledge. Incorporating knowledge into PLMs has been tried to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KE-PLMs) to provide a clear insight into this thriving field. We introduce appropriate taxonomies respectively for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to highlight the focus of these two kinds of tasks. For NLU, we take several types of knowledge into account and divide them into four categories: linguistic knowledge, text knowledge, knowledge graph (KG), and rule knowledge. The KE-PLMs for NLG are categorized into KG-based and retrieval-based methods. Finally, we point out some promising future directions of KE-PLMs.

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting. We introduce research works with comparisons and summaries and provide systematic resources to help beginners. We also discuss the potential reasons for emerging such reasoning abilities and highlight future research directions.

预训练的语言模型（PLM）在各种自然语言理解任务上取得了巨大的成功。另一方面，对PLM的简单微调对于特定于领域的任务可能是次优的，因为它们不可能涵盖所有域中的知识。尽管PLM的自适应预培训可以帮助他们获得特定于领域的知识，但需要大量的培训成本。此外，自适应预训练可能会通过造成灾难性忘记其常识来损害PLM在下游任务上的表现。为了克服PLM适应性适应性预训练的这种局限性，我们提出了一个新颖的域名适应框架，用于将PLMS创造为知识增强语言模型适应性（KALA），该框架调节了PLM的中间隐藏表示与域中的中间隐藏表示，由实体和实体和实体和实体和实体构成他们的关系事实。我们验证了Kala在问题答案中的性能，并在各个域的多个数据集上命名实体识别任务。结果表明，尽管在计算上有效，但我们的Kala在很大程度上优于适应性预训练。代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/nardien/kala/。

预先接受的语言模型实现了最先进的导致各种自然语言处理（NLP）任务。 GPT-3表明，缩放预先训练的语言模型可以进一步利用它们的巨大潜力。最近提出了一个名为Ernie 3.0的统一框架，以预先培训大型知识增强型号，并培训了具有10亿参数的模型。 Ernie 3.0在各种NLP任务上表现出最先进的模型。为了探讨缩放的表现，我们培养了百卢比的3.0泰坦参数型号，在PaddlePaddle平台上有高达260亿参数的泰坦。此外，我们设计了一种自我监督的对抗性损失和可控语言建模损失，以使ERNIE 3.0 TITAN产生可信和可控的文本。为了减少计算开销和碳排放，我们向Ernie 3.0泰坦提出了一个在线蒸馏框架，教师模型将同时教授学生和培训。埃塞尼3.0泰坦是迄今为止最大的中国密集预训练模型。经验结果表明，Ernie 3.0泰坦在68个NLP数据集中优于最先进的模型。

Answering complex questions that require making latent decisions is a challenging task, especially when limited supervision is available. Recent works leverage the capabilities of large language models (LMs) to perform complex question answering in a few-shot setting by demonstrating how to output intermediate rationalizations while solving the complex question in a single pass. We introduce ``Successive Prompting'', where we iteratively break down a complex task into a simple task, solve it, and then repeat the process until we get the final solution. Successive prompting decouples the supervision for decomposing complex questions from the supervision for answering simple questions, allowing us to (1) have multiple opportunities to query in-context examples at each reasoning step (2) learn question decomposition separately from question answering, including using synthetic data, and (3) use bespoke (fine-tuned) components for reasoning steps where a large LM does not perform well. The intermediate supervision is typically manually written, which can be expensive to collect. We introduce a way to generate a synthetic dataset which can be used to bootstrap a model's ability to decompose and answer intermediate questions. Our best model (with successive prompting) achieves an improvement of ~5% absolute F1 on a few-shot version of the DROP dataset when compared with a state-of-the-art model with the same supervision.

预训练的语言模型（PTLM）已显示出在自然语言任务上表现良好。许多先前的作品都以通过知识图（KGS）标记的关系链接的实体的形式利用结构性常识来协助PTLM。检索方法使用kg作为单独的静态模块，该模块限制了覆盖范围，因为kgs包含有限的知识。生成方法训练PTLMS kg三倍以提高获得知识的规模。但是，对符号KG实体的培训限制了其在涉及自然语言文本的任务中的适用性，在这些任务中，它们忽略了整体上下文。为了减轻这种情况，我们提出了一个以句子为条件的常识性上下文化器（COSE-CO）作为输入，以使其在生成与输入文本的整体上下文相关的任务中通常可用。为了训练Cose-Co，我们提出了一个新的数据集，其中包括句子和常识知识对。 COSE-CO推断出的知识是多种多样的，并且包含了基础KG中不存在的新实体。我们增强了在多选质量质量检查和开放式常识性推理任务中产生的知识，从而改善了CSQA，ARC，QASC和OBQA数据集的当前最佳方法。我们还展示了其在改善释义生成任务的基线模型方面的适用性。

We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method to retrofit Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) into Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data. PMR is capable of resolving the discrepancy between model pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of existing PLMs, and provides a unified solver for tackling various extraction tasks. To achieve this, we construct a large volume of general-purpose and high-quality MRC-style training data with the help of Wikipedia hyperlinks and design a Wiki Anchor Extraction task to guide the MRC-style pre-training process. Although conceptually simple, PMR is particularly effective in solving extraction tasks including Extractive Question Answering and Named Entity Recognition, where it shows tremendous improvements over previous approaches especially under low-resource settings. Moreover, viewing sequence classification task as a special case of extraction task in our MRC formulation, PMR is even capable to extract high-quality rationales to explain the classification process, providing more explainability of the predictions.

知识基础问题回答（KBQA）旨在通过知识库（KB）回答问题。早期研究主要集中于回答有关KB的简单问题，并取得了巨大的成功。但是，他们在复杂问题上的表现远非令人满意。因此，近年来，研究人员提出了许多新颖的方法，研究了回答复杂问题的挑战。在这项调查中，我们回顾了KBQA的最新进展，重点是解决复杂问题，这些问题通常包含多个主题，表达复合关系或涉及数值操作。详细说明，我们从介绍复杂的KBQA任务和相关背景开始。然后，我们描述用于复杂KBQA任务的基准数据集，并介绍这些数据集的构建过程。接下来，我们提出两个复杂KBQA方法的主流类别，即基于语义解析的方法（基于SP）的方法和基于信息检索的方法（基于IR）。具体而言，我们通过流程设计说明了他们的程序，并讨论了它们的主要差异和相似性。之后，我们总结了这两类方法在回答复杂问题时会遇到的挑战，并解释了现有工作中使用的高级解决方案和技术。最后，我们结论并讨论了与复杂的KBQA有关的几个有希望的方向，以进行未来的研究。

知识图（kg）嵌入是一种主流方法，用于推理不完整的kg。但是，受其固有浅层和静态体系结构的限制，它们几乎无法处理对复杂逻辑查询的不断上升，这些查询包括逻辑运算符，估算的边缘，多个源实体和未知的中间实体。在这项工作中，我们通过掩盖的预训练和微调策略介绍了知识图变压器（kgtransformer）。我们设计了一种kg三重变换方法，以使变压器能够处理kg，这是通过稀疏（MOE）稀疏激活的混合物进一步增强的。然后，我们将复杂的逻辑查询作为掩盖预测提出，并引入了两阶段掩盖的预训练策略，以提高可转移性和概括性。在两个基准上进行的广泛实验表明，KGTRANSFORMER可以始终超过基于KG的基准和九个内域和室外推理任务的高级编码。此外，KGTRANSFORMER可以通过提供解释给定答案的完整推理路径来解释性。

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

Question-answering datasets require a broad set of reasoning skills. We show how to use question decompositions to teach language models these broad reasoning skills in a robust fashion. Specifically, we use widely available QDMR representations to programmatically create hard-to-cheat synthetic contexts for real questions in six multi-step reasoning datasets. These contexts are carefully designed to avoid reasoning shortcuts prevalent in real contexts that prevent models from learning the right skills. This results in a pretraining dataset, named TeaBReaC, containing 525K multi-step questions (with associated formal programs) covering about 900 reasoning patterns. We show that pretraining standard language models (LMs) on TeaBReaC before fine-tuning them on target datasets improves their performance by up to 13 F1 points across 4 multi-step QA datasets, with up to 21 point gain on more complex questions. The resulting models also demonstrate higher robustness, with a 5-8 F1 point improvement on two contrast sets. Furthermore, TeaBReaC pretraining substantially improves model performance and robustness even when starting with numerate LMs pretrained using recent methods (e.g., PReasM, POET). Our work thus shows how to effectively use decomposition-guided contexts to robustly teach multi-step reasoning.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a long-standing topic in natural language processing (NLP). The MRC task aims to answer a question based on the given context. Recently studies focus on multi-hop MRC which is a more challenging extension of MRC, which to answer a question some disjoint pieces of information across the context are required. Due to the complexity and importance of multi-hop MRC, a large number of studies have been focused on this topic in recent years, therefore, it is necessary and worth reviewing the related literature. This study aims to investigate recent advances in the multi-hop MRC approaches based on 31 studies from 2018 to 2022. In this regard, first, the multi-hop MRC problem definition will be introduced, then 31 models will be reviewed in detail with a strong focus on their multi-hop aspects. They also will be categorized based on their main techniques. Finally, a fine-grain comprehensive comparison of the models and techniques will be presented.