Liunian Harold Li


2023

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Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation: Small Models Can Also “Think” Step-by-Step
Liunian Harold Li | Jack Hessel | Youngjae Yu | Xiang Ren | Kai-Wei Chang | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Chain-of-thought prompting (e.g., “Let’s think step-by-ste”) primes large language models to verbalize rationalization for their predictions. While chain-of-thought can lead to dramatic performance gains, benefits appear to emerge only for sufficiently large models (beyond 50B parameters). We show that orders-of-magnitude smaller models (125M—1.3B parameters) can still benefit from chain-of-thought prompting. To achieve this, we introduce Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation (SCoTD), a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations sampled from a significantly larger teacher model. Experiments across several commonsense benchmarks show that: 1) SCoTD enhances the performance of the student model in both supervised and few-shot settings, and especially for challenge sets; 2) sampling many reasoning chains per instance from the teacher is paramount; and 3) after distillation, student chain-of-thoughts are judged by humans as comparable to the teacher, despite orders of magnitude fewer parameters. We test several hypotheses regarding what properties of chain-of-thought samples are important, e.g., diversity vs. teacher likelihood vs. open-endedness. We release our corpus of chain-of-thought samples and code.

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MetaVL: Transferring In-Context Learning Ability From Language Models to Vision-Language Models
Masoud Monajatipoor | Liunian Harold Li | Mozhdeh Rouhsedaghat | Lin Yang | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Large-scale language models have shown the ability to adapt to a new task via conditioning on a few demonstrations (i.e., in-context learning). However, in the vision-language domain, most large-scale pre-trained vision-language (VL) models do not possess the ability to conduct in-context learning. How can we enable in-context learning for VL models? In this paper, we study an interesting hypothesis: can we transfer the in-context learning ability from the language domain to the VL domain? Specifically, we first meta-trains a language model to perform in-context learning on NLP tasks (as in MetaICL); then we transfer this model to perform VL tasks by attaching a visual encoder. Our experiments suggest that indeed in-context learning ability can be transferred cross modalities: our model considerably improves the in-context learning capability on VL tasks and can even compensate for the size of the model significantly. On VQA, OK-VQA, and GQA, our method could outperform the baseline model while having ~20 times fewer parameters.

2022

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Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop
Daphne Ippolito | Liunian Harold Li | Maria Leonor Pacheco | Danqi Chen | Nianwen Xue
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Student Research Workshop

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Multimodal Learning
Emanuele Bugliarello | Kai-Wei Cheng | Desmond Elliott | Spandana Gella | Aishwarya Kamath | Liunian Harold Li | Fangyu Liu | Jonas Pfeiffer | Edoardo Maria Ponti | Krishna Srinivasan | Ivan Vulić | Yinfei Yang | Da Yin
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Multimodal Learning

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GeoMLAMA: Geo-Diverse Commonsense Probing on Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models
Da Yin | Hritik Bansal | Masoud Monajatipoor | Liunian Harold Li | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent work has shown that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) store the relational knowledge learned from data and utilize it for performing downstream tasks. However, commonsense knowledge across different regions may vary. For instance, the color of bridal dress is white in American weddings whereas it is red in Chinese weddings. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark dataset, Geo-diverse Commonsense Multilingual Language Models Analysis (GeoMLAMA), for probing the diversity of the relational knowledge in multilingual PLMs. GeoMLAMA contains 3125 prompts in English, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, and Swahili, with a wide coverage of concepts shared by people from American, Chinese, Indian, Iranian and Kenyan cultures. We benchmark 11 standard multilingual PLMs on GeoMLAMA. Interestingly, we find that 1) larger multilingual PLMs variants do not necessarily store geo-diverse concepts better than its smaller variant; 2) multilingual PLMs are not intrinsically biased towards knowledge from the Western countries (the United States); 3) the native language of a country may not be the best language to probe its knowledge and 4) a language may better probe knowledge about a non-native country than its native country.

2021

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Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training Without Parallel Images and Captions
Liunian Harold Li | Haoxuan You | Zhecan Wang | Alireza Zareian | Shih-Fu Chang | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Pre-trained contextual vision-and-language (V&L) models have achieved impressive performance on various benchmarks. However, existing models require a large amount of parallel image-caption data for pre-training. Such data are costly to collect and require cumbersome curation. Inspired by unsupervised machine translation, we investigate if a strong V&L representation model can be learned through unsupervised pre-training without image-caption corpora. In particular, we propose to conduct “mask-and-predict” pre-training on text-only and image-only corpora and introduce the object tags detected by an object recognition model as anchor points to bridge two modalities. We find that such a simple approach achieves performance close to a model pre-trained with aligned data, on four English V&L benchmarks. Our work challenges the widely held notion that aligned data is necessary for V&L pre-training, while significantly reducing the amount of supervision needed for V&L models.

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Broaden the Vision: Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning
Da Yin | Liunian Harold Li | Ziniu Hu | Nanyun Peng | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge on which everyone agrees. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenes of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models’ ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

2020

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What Does BERT with Vision Look At?
Liunian Harold Li | Mark Yatskar | Da Yin | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Pre-trained visually grounded language models such as ViLBERT, LXMERT, and UNITER have achieved significant performance improvement on vision-and-language tasks but what they learn during pre-training remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate that certain attention heads of a visually grounded language model actively ground elements of language to image regions. Specifically, some heads can map entities to image regions, performing the task known as entity grounding. Some heads can even detect the syntactic relations between non-entity words and image regions, tracking, for example, associations between verbs and regions corresponding to their arguments. We denote this ability as syntactic grounding. We verify grounding both quantitatively and qualitatively, using Flickr30K Entities as a testbed.

2019

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Efficient Contextual Representation Learning With Continuous Outputs
Liunian Harold Li | Patrick H. Chen | Cho-Jui Hsieh | Kai-Wei Chang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

Contextual representation models have achieved great success in improving various downstream natural language processing tasks. However, these language-model-based encoders are difficult to train due to their large parameter size and high computational complexity. By carefully examining the training procedure, we observe that the softmax layer, which predicts a distribution of the target word, often induces significant overhead, especially when the vocabulary size is large. Therefore, we revisit the design of the output layer and consider directly predicting the pre-trained embedding of the target word for a given context. When applied to ELMo, the proposed approach achieves a 4-fold speedup and eliminates 80% trainable parameters while achieving competitive performance on downstream tasks. Further analysis shows that the approach maintains the speed advantage under various settings, even when the sentence encoder is scaled up.