Fei Tan


2023

pdf bib
Deeply Coupled Cross-Modal Prompt Learning
Xuejing Liu | Wei Tang | Jinghui Lu | Rui Zhao | Zhaojun Guo | Fei Tan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models (e.g., CLIP) have excelled in zero-shot generalization. Prompt tuning involved in the knowledge transfer from foundation models to downstream tasks has gained significant attention recently. Existing prompt-tuning methods in cross-modal learning, however, either solely focus on language branch, or learn vision-language interaction in a shallow mechanism. In this context, we propose a Deeply coupled Cross-modal Prompt learning (DCP) method based on CLIP. DCP flexibly accommodates the interplay between vision and language with a Cross-Modal Prompt Attention (CMPA) mechanism, which enables the mutual exchange of respective representation through a well-connected multi-head attention progressively and strongly. We then conduct comprehensive few-shot learning experiments on 11 image classification datasets and analyze the robustness to domain shift as well. Thorough experimental analysis evidently demonstrates the superb few-shot generalization and compelling domain adaption capacity of a well-executed DCP.

pdf bib
What Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners?
Jinghui Lu | Dongsheng Zhu | Weidong Han | Rui Zhao | Brian Mac Namee | Fei Tan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Current methods for prompt learning in zero-shot scenarios widely rely on a development set with sufficient human-annotated data to select the best-performing prompt template a posteriori. This is not ideal because in a real-world zero-shot scenario of practical relevance, no labelled data is available. Thus, we propose a simple yet effective method for screening reasonable prompt templates in zero-shot text classification: Perplexity Selection (Perplection). We hypothesize that language discrepancy can be used to measure the efficacy of prompt templates, and thereby develop a substantiated perplexity-based scheme allowing for forecasting the performance of prompt templates in advance. Experiments show that our method leads to improved prediction performance in a realistic zero-shot setting, eliminating the need for any labelled examples.

pdf bib
CWSeg: An Efficient and General Approach to Chinese Word Segmentation
Dedong Li | Rui Zhao | Fei Tan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)

In this work, we report our efforts in advancing Chinese Word Segmentation for the purpose of rapid deployment in different applications. The pre-trained language model (PLM) based segmentation methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, whereas this paradigm also poses challenges in the deployment. It includes the balance between performance and cost, segmentation ambiguity due to domain diversity and vague words boundary, and multi-grained segmentation. In this context, we propose a simple yet effective approach, namely CWSeg, to augment PLM-based schemes by developing cohort training and versatile decoding strategies. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficiency and generalization of our approach. The corresponding segmentation system is also implemented for practical usage and the demo is recorded.

2021

pdf bib
BERT-Beta: A Proactive Probabilistic Approach to Text Moderation
Fei Tan | Yifan Hu | Kevin Yen | Changwei Hu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text moderation for user generated content, which helps to promote healthy interaction among users, has been widely studied and many machine learning models have been proposed. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective by augmenting reactive reviews with proactive forecasting. Specifically, we propose a new concept text toxicity propensity to characterize the extent to which a text tends to attract toxic comments. Beta regression is then introduced to do the probabilistic modeling, which is demonstrated to function well in comprehensive experiments. We also propose an explanation method to communicate the model decision clearly. Both propensity scoring and interpretation benefit text moderation in a novel manner. Finally, the proposed scaling mechanism for the linear model offers useful insights beyond this work.

2020

pdf bib
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference
Bang An | Jie Lyu | Zhenyi Wang | Chunyuan Li | Changwei Hu | Fei Tan | Ruiyi Zhang | Yifan Hu | Changyou Chen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The neural attention mechanism plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. In particular, multi-head attention extends single-head attention by allowing a model to jointly attend information from different perspectives. However, without explicit constraining, multi-head attention may suffer from attention collapse, an issue that makes different heads extract similar attentive features, thus limiting the model’s representation power. In this paper, for the first time, we provide a novel understanding of multi-head attention from a Bayesian perspective. Based on the recently developed particle-optimization sampling techniques, we propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. Remarkably, our Bayesian interpretation provides theoretical inspirations on the not-well-understood questions: why and how one uses multi-head attention. Extensive experiments on various attention models and applications demonstrate that the proposed repulsive attention can improve the learned feature diversity, leading to more informative representations with consistent performance improvement on multiple tasks.

pdf bib
TNT: Text Normalization based Pre-training of Transformers for Content Moderation
Fei Tan | Yifan Hu | Changwei Hu | Keqian Li | Kevin Yen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this work, we present a new language pre-training model TNT (Text Normalization based pre-training of Transformers) for content moderation. Inspired by the masking strategy and text normalization, TNT is developed to learn language representation by training transformers to reconstruct text from four operation types typically seen in text manipulation: substitution, transposition, deletion, and insertion. Furthermore, the normalization involves the prediction of both operation types and token labels, enabling TNT to learn from more challenging tasks than the standard task of masked word recovery. As a result, the experiments demonstrate that TNT outperforms strong baselines on the hate speech classification task. Additional text normalization experiments and case studies show that TNT is a new potential approach to misspelling correction.

pdf bib
HABERTOR: An Efficient and Effective Deep Hatespeech Detector
Thanh Tran | Yifan Hu | Changwei Hu | Kevin Yen | Fei Tan | Kyumin Lee | Se Rim Park
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We present our HABERTOR model for detecting hatespeech in large scale user-generated content. Inspired by the recent success of the BERT model, we propose several modifications to BERT to enhance the performance on the downstream hatespeech classification task. HABERTOR inherits BERT’s architecture, but is different in four aspects: (i) it generates its own vocabularies and is pre-trained from the scratch using the largest scale hatespeech dataset; (ii) it consists of Quaternion-based factorized components, resulting in a much smaller number of parameters, faster training and inferencing, as well as less memory usage; (iii) it uses our proposed multi-source ensemble heads with a pooling layer for separate input sources, to further enhance its effectiveness; and (iv) it uses a regularized adversarial training with our proposed fine-grained and adaptive noise magnitude to enhance its robustness. Through experiments on the large-scale real-world hatespeech dataset with 1.4M annotated comments, we show that HABERTOR works better than 15 state-of-the-art hatespeech detection methods, including fine-tuning Language Models. In particular, comparing with BERT, our HABERTOR is 4 5 times faster in the training/inferencing phase, uses less than 1/3 of the memory, and has better performance, even though we pre-train it by using less than 1% of the number of words. Our generalizability analysis shows that HABERTOR transfers well to other unseen hatespeech datasets and is a more efficient and effective alternative to BERT for the hatespeech classification.