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.

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。

In this work, we explore "prompt tuning," a simple yet effective mechanism for learning "soft prompts" to condition frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Unlike the discrete text prompts used by GPT-3, soft prompts are learned through backpropagation and can be tuned to incorporate signals from any number of labeled examples. Our end-to-end learned approach outperforms GPT-3's few-shot learning by a large margin. More remarkably, through ablations on model size using T5, we show that prompt tuning becomes more competitive with scale: as models exceed billions of parameters, our method "closes the gap" and matches the strong performance of model tuning (where all model weights are tuned). This finding is especially relevant because large models are costly to share and serve and the ability to reuse one frozen model for multiple downstream tasks can ease this burden. Our method can be seen as a simplification of the recently proposed "prefix tuning" of Li and Liang (2021) and we provide a comparison to this and other similar approaches. Finally, we show that conditioning a frozen model with soft prompts confers benefits in robustness to domain transfer and enables efficient "prompt ensembling." * Work done as a Google AI Resident.

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.

本文着重于几次NLP任务的文本数据增强。现有的数据增强算法要么使用一个小型培训集来生成新的合成数据，要么利用与任务无关的启发式规则（例如，同义词替代）或微调通用预训练的语言模型（例如GPT2）。因此，这些方法具有特定于任务的知识，并且仅限于在简单任务中为弱基线产生低质量的合成数据。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了知识混合数据增强模型（KNOWDA）：使用知识混合培训（KOMT）在不同的NLP任务的混合物上预测的编码器LM。 KOMT是一种培训程序，将各种异质NLP任务的输入示例重新定义为统一的文本到文本格式，并采用不同粒度的目标，以学习生成部分或完整的样本。在KOMT的帮助下，Knowda可以隐含地将所需的特定于任务的知识从任务的混合中隐含地结合在一起，并通过一些给定的实例迅速掌握目标任务的固有综合定律。据我们所知，我们是首次尝试将任务数量扩展到多任务共同培训以进行数据扩展。广泛的实验表明，i）Knowda成功地通过少量基准的基准成功地提高了Albert和Deberta的表现，表现优于先前的最新数据增强基线； ii）KNOWDA还可以改善少数弹药任务的模型性能，这是KOMT中未包含的固定任务类型。

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.

多跳问题回答（QA）需要对多个文档进行推理，以回答一个复杂的问题并提供可解释的支持证据。但是，提供支持证据不足以证明模型已经执行了所需的推理来达到正确的答案。大多数现有的多跳质量检查方法也无法回答大部分子问题，即使他们的父母问题得到了正确的回答。在本文中，我们为多跳QA提出了基于及时的保护学习（PCL）框架，该框架从多跳QA任务中获取了新知识，同时保留了在单跳QA任务上学习的旧知识，从而减轻了遗忘。具体来说，我们首先在现有的单跳质量检查任务上训练模型，然后冻结该模型，并通过为多跳质量检查任务分配其他子网络来扩展它。此外，为了调整预训练的语言模型以刺激特定多跳问题所需的推理类型，我们学习了新型子网络的软提示，以执行特定于类型的推理。 HOTPOTQA基准测试的实验结果表明，PCL具有多跳质量质量质量检查的竞争力，并且在相应的单跳子问题上保留了良好的性能，这表明PCL通过忘记通过忘记来减轻知识丧失的功效。

大型语言模型在各种任务上显示出令人印象深刻的几次结果。但是，当知识是此类结果的关键时，就像问题回答和事实检查之类的任务一样，似乎需要存储知识的大量参数计数。众所周知，检索增强模型可以在不需要多个参数的情况下在知识密集的任务上表现出色，但是目前尚不清楚它们是否在几个弹药设置中工作。在这项工作中，我们介绍了地图集，这是一个经过精心设计和预先训练的增强语言模型，能够通过很少的培训示例学习知识密集型任务。我们对包括MMLU，苏格兰短裙和归类等各种任务进行评估，并研究文档索引内容的影响，表明它可以很容易地进行更新。值得注意的是，在自然问题上仅使用64个示例在自然问题上达到超过42 \％的准确性，尽管参数少了50倍，但比540B参数模型的表现优于540b参数模型。

文本匹配是信息检索和自然语言处理的基本技术。文本匹配任务共享确定两个给定文本之间关系的相同范例。这些关系因任务而异，例如〜在文档检索中相关性，释义识别中的语义一致性和所回答的可回答判断。但是，文本匹配的基本信号保留在有限范围中，即〜精确匹配，语义匹配和推理匹配。理想情况下，良好的文本匹配模型可以学会捕获和汇总这些信号，以实现不同的匹配任务以实现竞争性能，而最近的最新文本匹配模型，例如〜预训练的语言模型（PLM）很难概括。这是因为在特定于任务的数据集上的端到端监督学习使模型过分强调了数据示例偏置和特定于任务的信号，而不是基本的匹配信号。为了克服这个问题，我们采用了专业化的将军培训策略，并将其称为比赛推出。在专业阶段，对不同匹配任务的描述映射到一些提示令牌。在概括阶段，匹配模型通过接受各种匹配任务的培训来探索基本匹配信号。高不同的匹配任务避免了模型拟合特定任务的数据偏差，因此该模型可以专注于学习基本匹配信号。同时，在第一步中获得的提示令牌有助于模型区分不同的特定任务匹配信号。公共数据集上的实验结果表明，匹配点可以提高PLM在文本匹配中的多任务概括能力，并产生更好的内域多任务，外域多任务和新任务适应性性能由以前的微调范式训练的特定于任务模型。

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.

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。

Question Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a re-design of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG models for different QG datasets, which is resource-intensive and ungeneralizable. To solve the problems, we propose a model named Unified-QG based on lifelong learning techniques, which can continually learn QG tasks across different datasets and formats. Specifically, we first build a format-convert encoding to transform different kinds of QG formats into a unified representation. Then, a method named \emph{STRIDER} (\emph{S}imilari\emph{T}y \emph{R}egular\emph{I}zed \emph{D}ifficult \emph{E}xample \emph{R}eplay) is built to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in continual QG learning. Extensive experiments were conducted on $8$ QG datasets across $4$ QG formats (answer-extraction, answer-abstraction, multi-choice, and boolean QG) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our Unified-QG can effectively and continually adapt to QG tasks when datasets and formats vary. In addition, we verify the ability of a single trained Unified-QG model in improving $8$ Question Answering (QA) systems' performance through generating synthetic QA data.

近年来，统一的视觉语言框架已经大大提高，其中大多数采用编码器架构将图像文本任务统一为序列到序列的生成。但是，现有的视频语言（VIDL）模型仍需要在每个任务的模型体系结构和培训目标中进行特定于任务的设计。在这项工作中，我们探索了一个统一的VIDL框架薰衣草，其中蒙版语言建模（MLM）用作所有前训练和下游任务的常见接口。这样的统一导致了简化的模型体系结构，在多模式编码器之上，只需要一个轻巧的MLM头，而不是具有更多参数的解码器。令人惊讶的是，实验结果表明，这个统一的框架在14个VIDL基准测试中实现了竞争性能，涵盖了视频问答，文本到视频检索和视频字幕。广泛的分析进一步证明了薰衣草比现有VIDL方法的优势：（i）在多任务列出时仅使用一组参数值支持所有下游任务； （ii）对各种下游任务的几乎没有概括； （iii）在视频问题回答任务上启用零射门评估。代码可从https://github.com/microsoft/lavender获得。

预测任务标签和为其预测生成自由文本阐述的自律化模型可以实现与NLP系统更直观的交互。然而，这些模型目前正在接受大量人为的自由文本解释，每个任务都会阻碍更广泛的使用。我们建议使用少数培训例子研究更现实的自律化建立。我们出示2月 - 一个标准化的四个现有英语数据集和相关指标。我们通过2月份广泛探索自然语言提示来确定正确的提示方法。然后，通过使用此提示并缩放模型大小，我们证明了几次拍摄自合合理化的进展。我们展示了这项任务的完善房间仍然有充足的改进空间：人类注册人评估的生成解释的平均合理性最多为51％，而人类解释的合理性是76％。我们希望2月份与我们的拟议方法一起促使社区承担几次拍摄的自我合理化挑战。

关于信息检索的许多最新研究集中在如何从一项任务（通常具有丰富的监督数据）转移到有限的其他各种任务，并隐含地假设可以从一个任务概括到所有其余的任务。但是，这忽略了这样一个事实，即有许多多样化和独特的检索任务，每个任务都针对不同的搜索意图，查询和搜索域。在本文中，我们建议使用几乎没有散热的检索，每个任务都有一个简短的描述和一些示例。为了扩大一些示例的功能，我们提出了针对检索器（即将到来）的及时基本查询生成，该查询将大型语言模型（LLM）作为几个弹片查询生成器，并根据生成的数据创建特定于任务的检索器。通过LLM的概括能力提供动力，即要来源使得可以仅基于一些示例{没有自然问题或MS MARCO来训练％问题生成器或双重编码器，就可以仅基于一些示例{没有}来创建特定于任务的端到端检索。出乎意料的是，LLM提示不超过8个示例，允许双重编码器在MARCO（例如Colbert V2）上训练的大量工程模型平均在11个检索套件中超过1.2 NDCG。使用相同生成数据的进一步培训标准尺寸的重新级别可获得5.0点NDCG的改进。我们的研究确定，查询产生比以前观察到的更有效，尤其是在给出少量特定于任务知识的情况下。

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) requires models to answer factoid questions with no context given. The common way for this task is to train models on a large-scale annotated dataset to retrieve related documents and generate answers based on these documents. In this paper, we show that the ODQA architecture can be dramatically simplified by treating Large Language Models (LLMs) as a knowledge corpus and propose a Self-Prompting framework for LLMs to perform ODQA so as to eliminate the need for training data and external knowledge corpus. Concretely, we firstly generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and one-sentence explanations for these QAs by prompting LLMs step by step and then leverage the generated QA pairs for in-context learning. Experimental results show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods by +8.8 EM averagely on three widely-used ODQA datasets, and even achieves comparable performance with several retrieval-augmented fine-tuned models.

大型语言模型（例如GPT-3（Brown等，2020）可以执行任意任务，而无需在仅使用少数标签示例的提示之后进行微调。可以将任意任务重新构成自然语言提示，并且可以要求语言模型生成完成，并以称为基于及时的学习的范式间接执行该任务。迄今为止，主要针对单向语言模型证明了新兴迅速的学习能力。但是，预先培训的双向语言模型（例如蒙版语言建模）为转移学习提供了更强大的学习表示。这激发了促使双向模型的可能性，但是它们的预训练目标使它们与现有的提示范式不相容。我们提出SAP（顺序自动回旋提示），该技术可以使双向模型提示。利用机器翻译任务作为案例研究，我们提示了带有SAP的双向MT5模型（Xue等，2021），并演示其少量拍摄和零照片的翻译优于GPT-3等单向模型的几个单拍翻译和XGLM（Lin等，2021），尽管MT5的参数减少了约50％。我们进一步表明SAP对问题的回答和摘要有效。我们的结果首次表明基于及时的学习是更广泛的语言模型的新兴属性，而不仅仅是单向模型。

预训练的语言模型（PLM）在自然语言生成（NLG）任务中取得了显着的成功。到目前为止，大多数PLM都使用大型一般语料库以无监督的方式进行了预培训。同时，与无监督的模型相比，预先训练的模型越来越多地显示出较低的数据表现出色。受监督预训练的成功的激励，我们提出了自然语言生成的多任务监督预训练（MVP）。为了预先培训文本生成模型MVP，我们从七个生成任务中收集了45个数据集的标记预训练语料库。对于每个任务，我们进一步预先训练特定的软提示，以刺激执行特定任务的模型能力。广泛的实验证明了我们在许多NLG任务中有监督的预训练的有效性，并且我们的一般方法在17个数据集中的12个中实现了最先进的性能。

最近的自然语言理解进展（NLU）已经被驱动，部分是由胶水，超级格，小队等的基准。事实上，许多NLU模型现在在许多任务中匹配或超过“人类水平”性能这些基准。然而，大多数这些基准测试都提供模型访问相对大量的标记数据进行培训。因此，该模型提供了比人类所需的更多数据，以实现强大的性能。这有动机侧重于侧重于改善NLU模型的少量学习性能。然而，缺乏少量射门的标准化评估基准，导致不同纸张中的不同实验设置。为了帮助加速这一工作的工作，我们介绍了线索（受限制的语言理解评估标准），这是评估NLU模型的几次拍摄学习功能的基准。我们证明，虽然最近的模型在获得大量标记数据时达到人类性能，但对于大多数任务，少量拍摄设置中的性能存在巨大差距。我们还展示了几个拍摄设置中替代模型家族和适应技术之间的差异。最后，我们讨论了在设计实验设置时讨论了评估真实少量学习绩效的实验设置，并提出了统一的标准化方法，以获得少量学习评估。我们的目标是鼓励对NLU模型的研究，可以概括为具有少数示例的新任务。线索的代码和数据可以在https://github.com/microsoft/clues提供。

With increasing scale, large language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities, especially as zero-shot learners, like GPT-3. However, these results rely heavily on delicate prompt design and large computation. In this work, we explore whether the strong zero-shot ability could be achieved at a smaller model scale without any external supervised data. To achieve this goal, we revisit masked language modeling and present a geometry-guided self-supervised learning method (Go-tuningfor short) by taking a small number of task-aware self-supervised data to update language models further. Experiments show that Go-tuning can enable T5-small (80M) competitive zero-shot results compared with large language models, such as T5-XL (3B). We also apply Go-tuning on multi-task settings and develop a multi-task model, mgo-T5 (250M). It can reach the average performance of OPT (175B) on 9 datasets.