Gabriel Ilharco


2023

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TaskWeb: Selecting Better Source Tasks for Multi-task NLP
Joongwon Kim | Akari Asai | Gabriel Ilharco | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent work in NLP has shown promising results in training models on large amounts of tasks to achieve better generalization. However, it is not well-understood how tasks are related, and how helpful training tasks can be chosen for a new task. In this work, we investigate whether knowing task relationships via pairwise task transfer improves choosing one or more source tasks that help to learn a new target task. We provide TaskWeb, a large-scale benchmark of pairwise task transfers for 22 NLP tasks using three different model types, sizes, and adaptation methods, spanning about 25,000 experiments. Then, we design a new method TaskShop based on our analysis of TaskWeb. TaskShop uses TaskWeb to estimate the benefit of using a source task for learning a new target task, and to choose a subset of helpful training tasks for multi-task training. Our method improves overall rankings and top-k precision of source tasks by 10% and 38%, respectively. We also use TaskShop to build much smaller multi-task training sets that improve zero-shot performances across 11 different target tasks by at least 4.3%.

2022

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Exploring The Landscape of Distributional Robustness for Question Answering Models
Anas Awadalla | Mitchell Wortsman | Gabriel Ilharco | Sewon Min | Ian Magnusson | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Ludwig Schmidt
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

We conduct a large empirical evaluation to investigate the landscape of distributional robustness in question answering. Our investigation spans over 350 models and 16 question answering datasets, including a diverse set of architectures, model sizes, and adaptation methods (e.g., fine-tuning, adapter tuning, in-context learning, etc.). We find that, in many cases, model variations do not affect robustness and in-distribution performance alone determines out-of-distribution performance. Moreover, our findings indicate thati) zero-shot and in-context learning methods are more robust to distribution shifts than fully fine-tuned models;ii) few-shot prompt fine-tuned models exhibit better robustness than few-shot fine-tuned span prediction models;iii) parameter-efficient and robustness enhancing training methods provide no significant robustness improvements. In addition, we publicly release all evaluations to encourage researchers to further analyze robustness trends for question answering models.

2021

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Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Jesse Dodge | Maarten Sap | Ana Marasović | William Agnew | Gabriel Ilharco | Dirk Groeneveld | Margaret Mitchell | Matt Gardner
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.

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Finetuning Pretrained Transformers into RNNs
Jungo Kasai | Hao Peng | Yizhe Zhang | Dani Yogatama | Gabriel Ilharco | Nikolaos Pappas | Yi Mao | Weizhu Chen | Noah A. Smith
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Transformers have outperformed recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in natural language generation. But this comes with a signifi- cant computational cost, as the attention mechanism’s complexity scales quadratically with sequence length. Efficient transformer variants have received increasing interest in recent works. Among them, a linear-complexity recurrent variant has proven well suited for autoregressive generation. It approximates the softmax attention with randomized or heuristic feature maps, but can be difficult to train and may yield suboptimal accuracy. This work aims to convert a pretrained transformer into its efficient recurrent counterpart, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy. Specifically, we propose a swap-then-finetune procedure: in an off-the-shelf pretrained transformer, we replace the softmax attention with its linear-complexity recurrent alternative and then finetune. With a learned feature map, our approach provides an improved tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy over the standard transformer and other recurrent variants. We also show that the finetuning process has lower training cost relative to training these recurrent variants from scratch. As many models for natural language tasks are increasingly dependent on large-scale pretrained transformers, this work presents a viable approach to improving inference efficiency without repeating the expensive pretraining process.

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Probing Contextual Language Models for Common Ground with Visual Representations
Gabriel Ilharco | Rowan Zellers | Ali Farhadi | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

The success of large-scale contextual language models has attracted great interest in probing what is encoded in their representations. In this work, we consider a new question: to what extent contextual representations of concrete nouns are aligned with corresponding visual representations? We design a probing model that evaluates how effective are text-only representations in distinguishing between matching and non-matching visual representations. Our findings show that language representations alone provide a strong signal for retrieving image patches from the correct object categories. Moreover, they are effective in retrieving specific instances of image patches; textual context plays an important role in this process. Visually grounded language models slightly outperform text-only language models in instance retrieval, but greatly under-perform humans. We hope our analyses inspire future research in understanding and improving the visual capabilities of language models.

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Recognizing Multimodal Entailment
Cesar Ilharco | Afsaneh Shirazi | Arjun Gopalan | Arsha Nagrani | Blaz Bratanic | Chris Bregler | Christina Funk | Felipe Ferreira | Gabriel Barcik | Gabriel Ilharco | Georg Osang | Jannis Bulian | Jared Frank | Lucas Smaira | Qin Cao | Ricardo Marino | Roma Patel | Thomas Leung | Vaiva Imbrasaite
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

How information is created, shared and consumed has changed rapidly in recent decades, in part thanks to new social platforms and technologies on the web. With ever-larger amounts of unstructured and limited labels, organizing and reconciling information from different sources and modalities is a central challenge in machine learning. This cutting-edge tutorial aims to introduce the multimodal entailment task, which can be useful for detecting semantic alignments when a single modality alone does not suffice for a whole content understanding. Starting with a brief overview of natural language processing, computer vision, structured data and neural graph learning, we lay the foundations for the multimodal sections to follow. We then discuss recent multimodal learning literature covering visual, audio and language streams, and explore case studies focusing on tasks which require fine-grained understanding of visual and linguistic semantics question answering, veracity and hatred classification. Finally, we introduce a new dataset for recognizing multimodal entailment, exploring it in a hands-on collaborative section. Overall, this tutorial gives an overview of multimodal learning, introduces a multimodal entailment dataset, and encourages future research in the topic.

2020

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High Performance Natural Language Processing
Gabriel Ilharco | Cesar Ilharco | Iulia Turc | Tim Dettmers | Felipe Ferreira | Kenton Lee
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

Scale has played a central role in the rapid progress natural language processing has enjoyed in recent years. While benchmarks are dominated by ever larger models, efficient hardware use is critical for their widespread adoption and further progress in the field. In this cutting-edge tutorial, we will recapitulate the state-of-the-art in natural language processing with scale in perspective. After establishing these foundations, we will cover a wide range of techniques for improving efficiency, including knowledge distillation, quantization, pruning, more efficient architectures, along with case studies and practical implementation tricks.

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Evaluating Models’ Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets
Matt Gardner | Yoav Artzi | Victoria Basmov | Jonathan Berant | Ben Bogin | Sihao Chen | Pradeep Dasigi | Dheeru Dua | Yanai Elazar | Ananth Gottumukkala | Nitish Gupta | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Gabriel Ilharco | Daniel Khashabi | Kevin Lin | Jiangming Liu | Nelson F. Liu | Phoebe Mulcaire | Qiang Ning | Sameer Singh | Noah A. Smith | Sanjay Subramanian | Reut Tsarfaty | Eric Wallace | Ally Zhang | Ben Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization. Unfortunately, when a dataset has systematic gaps (e.g., annotation artifacts), these evaluations are misleading: a model can learn simple decision rules that perform well on the test set but do not capture the abilities a dataset is intended to test. We propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. In particular, after a dataset is constructed, we recommend that the dataset authors manually perturb the test instances in small but meaningful ways that (typically) change the gold label, creating contrast sets. Contrast sets provide a local view of a model’s decision boundary, which can be used to more accurately evaluate a model’s true linguistic capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of contrast sets by creating them for 10 diverse NLP datasets (e.g., DROP reading comprehension, UD parsing, and IMDb sentiment analysis). Although our contrast sets are not explicitly adversarial, model performance is significantly lower on them than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases. We release our contrast sets as new evaluation benchmarks and encourage future dataset construction efforts to follow similar annotation processes.

2019

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Large-Scale Representation Learning from Visually Grounded Untranscribed Speech
Gabriel Ilharco | Yuan Zhang | Jason Baldridge
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Systems that can associate images with their spoken audio captions are an important step towards visually grounded language learning. We describe a scalable method to automatically generate diverse audio for image captioning datasets. This supports pretraining deep networks for encoding both audio and images, which we do via a dual encoder that learns to align latent representations from both modalities. We show that a masked margin softmax loss for such models is superior to the standard triplet loss. We fine-tune these models on the Flickr8k Audio Captions Corpus and obtain state-of-the-art results—improving recall in the top 10 from 29.6% to 49.5%. We also obtain human ratings on retrieval outputs to better assess the impact of incidentally matching image-caption pairs that were not associated in the data, finding that automatic evaluation substantially underestimates the quality of the retrieved results.