The recent progress of AI can be largely attributed to large language models (LLMs). However, their escalating memory requirements introduce challenges for machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers. Addressing this requires developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. This necessitates considerable coding and intricate configuration efforts with existing model parallel tools, such as Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, and Alpa. These tools require users’ expertise in machine learning systems (MLSys), creating a bottleneck in LLM development, particularly for developers without MLSys background. In this work, we present RedCoast (Redco), a lightweight and user-friendly tool crafted to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs, as well as to simplify ML pipeline development. The design of Redco emphasizes two key aspects. Firstly, to automate model parallelism, our study identifies two straightforward rules to generate tensor parallel strategies for any given LLM. Integrating these rules into Redco facilitates effortless distributed LLM training and inference, eliminating the need of additional coding or complex configurations. We demonstrate the effectiveness by applying Redco on a set of LLM architectures, such as GPT-J, LLaMA, T5, and OPT, up to the size of 66B. Secondly, we propose a mechanism that allows for the customization of diverse ML pipelines through the definition of merely three functions, avoiding redundant and formulaic code like multi-host related processing. This mechanism proves adaptable across a spectrum of ML algorithms, from foundational language modeling to complex algorithms like meta-learning and reinforcement learning. As a result, Redco implementations exhibit significantly fewer lines of code compared to their official counterparts. RedCoast (Redco) has been released under Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/tanyuqian/redco.

Online conversation is a ubiquitous way to share information and connect everyone but repetitive idiomatic text typing takes users a lot of time. This paper demonstrates a simple yet effective cloud based smart compose system to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. Heuristics from different perspectives are designed to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency. From the modeling side, the decoder-only model exploited the previous turns of conversational history in a computation lightweight manner. Besides, a novel phrase tokenizer is proposed to reduce latency without losing the composing quality further. Additionally, the caching mechanism is applied to the serving framework. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/U1KXkaqr60g.We open-sourced our phrase tokenizer in https://github.com/tensorflow/text.

It is crucial to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations to support knowledge discovery and broad applications. Previous KG construction methods, based on either crowdsourcing or text mining, are often limited to a small predefined set of relations due to manual cost or restrictions in text corpus. Recent research proposed to use pretrained language models (LMs) as implicit knowledge bases that accept knowledge queries with prompts. Yet, the implicit knowledge lacks many desirable properties of a full-scale symbolic KG, such as easy access, navigation, editing, and quality assurance. In this paper, we propose a new approach of harvesting massive KGs of arbitrary relations from pretrained LMs. With minimal input of a relation definition (a prompt and a few shot of example entity pairs), the approach efficiently searches in the vast entity pair space to extract diverse accurate knowledge of the desired relation. We develop an effective search-and-rescore mechanism for improved efficiency and accuracy. We deploy the approach to harvest KGs of over 400 new relations, from LMs of varying capacities such as RoBERTaNet. Extensive human and automatic evaluations show our approach manages to extract diverse accurate knowledge, including tuples of complex relations (e.g., “A is capable of but not good at B”). The resulting KGs as a symbolic interpretation of the source LMs also reveal new insights into the LMs’ knowledge capacities.

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial attacks or generating prompts to control language models. Reinforcement learning (RL) on the other hand offers a more flexible solution by allowing users to plug in arbitrary task metrics as reward. Yet previous RL algorithms for text generation, such as policy gradient (on-policy RL) and Q-learning (off-policy RL), are often notoriously inefficient or unstable to train due to the large sequence space and the sparse reward received only at the end of sequences. In this paper, we introduce a new RL formulation for text generation from the soft Q-learning (SQL) perspective. It enables us to draw from the latest RL advances, such as path consistency learning, to combine the best of on-/off-policy updates, and learn effectively from sparse reward. We apply the approach to a wide range of novel text generation tasks, including learning from noisy/negative examples, adversarial attacks, and prompt generation. Experiments show our approach consistently outperforms both task-specialized algorithms and the previous RL methods.

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialog datasets – CovidDialog – (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. While the largest of their kind, these two datasets are still relatively small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. Training complex dialog generation models on small datasets bears high risk of overfitting. To alleviate overfitting, we develop a multi-task learning approach, which regularizes the data-deficient dialog generation task with a masked token prediction task. Experiments on the CovidDialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We perform both human evaluation and automatic evaluation of dialogs generated by our method. Results show that the generated responses are promising in being doctor-like, relevant to conversation history, clinically informative and correct. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/COVID-Dialogue.

Large-scale language models (LMs) pretrained on massive corpora of text, such as GPT-2, are powerful open-domain text generators. However, as our systematic examination reveals, it is still challenging for such models to generate coherent long passages of text (e.g., 1000 tokens), especially when the models are fine-tuned to the target domain on a small corpus. Previous planning-then-generation methods also fall short of producing such long text in various domains. To overcome the limitations, we propose a simple but effective method of generating text in a progressive manner, inspired by generating images from low to high resolution. Our method first produces domain-specific content keywords and then progressively refines them into complete passages in multiple stages. The simple design allows our approach to take advantage of pretrained LMs at each stage and effectively adapt to any target domain given only a small set of examples. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study with a broad set of evaluation metrics, and show that our approach significantly improves upon the fine-tuned large LMs and various planning-then-generation methods in terms of quality and sample efficiency. Human evaluation also validates that our model generations are more coherent.

Natural language generation (NLG) spans a broad range of tasks, each of which serves for specific objectives and desires different properties of generated text. The complexity makes automatic evaluation of NLG particularly challenging. Previous work has typically focused on a single task and developed individual evaluation metrics based on specific intuitions. In this paper, we propose a unifying perspective based on the nature of information change in NLG tasks, including compression (e.g., summarization), transduction (e.g., text rewriting), and creation (e.g., dialog). _Information alignment_ between input, context, and output text plays a common central role in characterizing the generation. With automatic alignment prediction models, we develop a family of interpretable metrics that are suitable for evaluating key aspects of different NLG tasks, often without need of gold reference data. Experiments show the uniformly designed metrics achieve stronger or comparable correlations with human judgement compared to state-of-the-art metrics in each of diverse tasks, including text summarization, style transfer, and knowledge-grounded dialog.

Given a document and a target aspect (e.g., a topic of interest), aspect-based abstractive summarization attempts to generate a summary with respect to the aspect. Previous studies usually assume a small pre-defined set of aspects and fall short of summarizing on other diverse topics. In this work, we study summarizing on arbitrary aspects relevant to the document, which significantly expands the application of the task in practice. Due to the lack of supervision data, we develop a new weak supervision construction method and an aspect modeling scheme, both of which integrate rich external knowledge sources such as ConceptNet and Wikipedia. Experiments show our approach achieves performance boosts on summarizing both real and synthetic documents given pre-defined or arbitrary aspects.

We introduce Texar, an open-source toolkit aiming to support the broad set of text generation tasks that transform any inputs into natural language, such as machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and so forth. With the design goals of modularity, versatility, and extensibility in mind, Texar extracts common patterns underlying the diverse tasks and methodologies, creates a library of highly reusable modules and functionalities, and allows arbitrary model architectures and algorithmic paradigms. In Texar, model architecture, inference, and learning processes are properly decomposed. Modules at a high concept level can be freely assembled or plugged in/swapped out. Texar is thus particularly suitable for researchers and practitioners to do fast prototyping and experimentation. The versatile toolkit also fosters technique sharing across different text generation tasks. Texar supports both TensorFlow and PyTorch, and is released under Apache License 2.0 at https://www.texar.io.

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used for dialogue policy optimization. However, many DRL-based policies are not sample-efficient. Most recent advances focus on improving DRL optimization algorithms to address this issue. Here, we take an alternative route of designing neural network structure that is better suited for DRL-based dialogue management. The proposed structured deep reinforcement learning is based on graph neural networks (GNN), which consists of some sub-networks, each one for a node on a directed graph. The graph is defined according to the domain ontology and each node can be considered as a sub-agent. During decision making, these sub-agents have internal message exchange between neighbors on the graph. We also propose an approach to jointly optimize the graph structure as well as the parameters of GNN. Experiments show that structured DRL significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in almost all of the 18 tasks of the PyDial benchmark.

We introduce Texar, an open-source toolkit aiming to support the broad set of text generation tasks. Different from many existing toolkits that are specialized for specific applications (e.g., neural machine translation), Texar is designed to be highly flexible and versatile. This is achieved by abstracting the common patterns underlying the diverse tasks and methodologies, creating a library of highly reusable modules and functionalities, and enabling arbitrary model architectures and various algorithmic paradigms. The features make Texar particularly suitable for technique sharing and generalization across different text generation applications. The toolkit emphasizes heavily on extensibility and modularized system design, so that components can be freely plugged in or swapped out. We conduct extensive experiments and case studies to demonstrate the use and advantage of the toolkit.