With the continuous growth of large language models, the process of fine-tuning these models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Prompt tuning, a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts, has emerged as an effective and efficient approach for adapting large pre-trained language models. However, most existing prompt tuning approaches only introduce prompts at the input layer, limiting their performance and leaving large rooms for improvement. In this work, we propose a novel Attention Prompt tuning method, namely APrompt, for efficient adaptation of pre-trained language models. We first demonstrate that existing prompt tuning can be considered as a special case of attention prompt tuning. We then formally introduce APrompt, which incorporates query, key, and value prompts into the attention layer to guide the attention computation during fine-tuning. Experimental results on the SuperGLUE benchmark consistently demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and full fine-tuning method with pre-trained models at different scales. In addition, a comprehensive set of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the prompt design, as well as the efficiency of our approach.

The task of web information extraction is to extract target fields of an object from web pages, such as extracting the name, genre and actor from a movie page. Recent sequential modeling approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results on web information extraction. However, most of these methods only focus on extracting information from textual sources while ignoring the rich information from other modalities such as image and web layout. In this work, we propose a novel MUltimodal Structural Transformer (MUST) that incorporates multiple modalities for web information extraction. Concretely, we develop a structural encoder that jointly encodes the multimodal information based on the HTML structure of the web layout, where high-level DOM nodes, and low-level text and image tokens are introduced to represent the entire page. Structural attention patterns are designed to learn effective cross-modal embeddings for all DOM nodes and low-level tokens. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on WebSRC and Common Crawl benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MUST over several state-of-the-art baselines.

The task of product attribute value extraction is to identify values of an attribute from product information. Product attributes are important features, which help improve online shopping experience of customers, such as product search, recommendation and comparison. Most existing works only focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. However, with the emerging nature of e-commerce, new products with their unique set of new attributes are constantly generated from different retailers and merchants. Collecting a large number of annotations for every new attribute is costly and time consuming. Therefore, it is an important research problem for product attribute value extraction with limited data. In this work, we propose a novel prompt tuning approach with Mixed Prompts for few-shot Attribute Value Extraction, namely MixPAVE. Specifically, MixPAVE introduces only a small amount (< 1%) of trainable parameters, i.e., a mixture of two learnable prompts, while keeping the existing extraction model frozen. In this way, MixPAVE not only benefits from parameter-efficient training, but also avoids model overfitting on limited training examples. Experimental results on two product benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the prompt design, as well as the efficiency of our approach.

Many real-world applications require making multiple predictions from the same text. Fine-tuning a large pre-trained language model for each downstream task causes computational burdens in the inference time due to several times of forward passes. To amortize the computational cost, freezing the language model and building lightweight models for downstream tasks based on fixed text representations are common solutions. Accordingly, how to learn fixed but general text representations that can generalize well to unseen downstream tasks becomes a challenge. Previous works have shown that the generalizability of representations can be improved by fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with some source tasks in a multi-tasking way. In this work, we propose a prefix-based method to learn the fixed text representations with source tasks. We learn a task-specific prefix for each source task independently and combine them to get the final representations. Our experimental results show that prefix-based training performs better than multi-tasking training and can update the text representations at a smaller computational cost than multi-tasking training.

Automatic question generation (AQG) is the task of generating a question from a given passage and an answer. Most existing AQG methods aim at encoding the passage and the answer to generate the question. However, limited work has focused on modeling the correlation between the target answer and the generated question. Moreover, unseen or rare word generation has not been studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which incorporates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. Specifically, the question generation component consists of an encoder that jointly encodes the answer with the passage, and a decoder that produces the question. The question answering component then re-asks the generated question on the passage to ensure that the target answer is obtained. We further introduce a knowledge distillation module to improve the model generalization ability. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art methods.

We propose an autoregressive entity linking model, that is trained with two auxiliary tasks, and learns to re-rank generated samples at inference time. Our proposed novelties address two weaknesses in the literature. First, a recent method proposes to learn mention detection and then entity candidate selection, but relies on predefined sets of candidates. We use encoder-decoder autoregressive entity linking in order to bypass this need, and propose to train mention detection as an auxiliary task instead. Second, previous work suggests that re-ranking could help correct prediction errors. We add a new, auxiliary task, match prediction, to learn re-ranking. Without the use of a knowledge base or candidate sets, our model sets a new state of the art in two benchmark datasets of entity linking: COMETA in the biomedical domain, and AIDA-CoNLL in the news domain. We show through ablation studies that each of the two auxiliary tasks increases performance, and that re-ranking is an important factor to the increase. Finally, our low-resource experimental results suggest that performance on the main task benefits from the knowledge learned by the auxiliary tasks, and not just from the additional training data.

Automatic product attribute value extraction refers to the task of identifying values of an attribute from the product information. Product attributes are essential in improving online shopping experience for customers. Most existing methods focus on extracting attribute values from product title and description. However, in many real-world applications, a product is usually represented by multiple modalities beyond title and description, such as product specifications, text and visual information from the product image, etc. In this paper, we propose SMARTAVE, a Structure Mltimodal trAnsformeR for producT Attribute Value Extraction, which jointly encodes the structured product information from multiple modalities. Specifically, in SMARTAVE encoder, we introduce hyper-tokens to represent the modality-level information, and local-tokens to represent the original text and visual inputs. Structured attention patterns are designed among the hyper-tokens and local-tokens for learning effective product representation. The attribute values are then extracted based on the learned embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments on two multimodal product datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the structured attentions in modeling the multimodal product information.

Distilling state-of-the-art transformer models into lightweight student models is an effective way to reduce computation cost at inference time. The student models are typically compact transformers with fewer parameters, while expensive operations such as self-attention persist. Therefore, the improved inference speed may still be unsatisfactory for real-time or high-volume use cases. In this paper, we aim to further push the limit of inference speed by distilling teacher models into bigger, sparser student models – bigger in that they scale up to billions of parameters; sparser in that most of the model parameters are n-gram embeddings. Our experiments on six single-sentence text classification tasks show that these student models retain 97% of the RoBERTa-Large teacher performance on average, and meanwhile achieve up to 600x speed-up on both GPUs and CPUs at inference time. Further investigation reveals that our pipeline is also helpful for sentence-pair classification tasks, and in domain generalization settings.

Prompt tuning is a new, efficient NLP transfer learning paradigm that adds a task-specific prompt in each input instance during the model training stage. It freezes the pre-trained language model and only optimizes a few task-specific prompts. In this paper, we propose a conditional prompt generation method to generate prompts for each input instance, referred to as the Instance-Dependent Prompt Generation (IDPG). Unlike traditional prompt tuning methods that use a fixed prompt, IDPG introduces a lightweight and trainable component to generate prompts based on each input sentence. Extensive experiments on ten natural language understanding (NLU) tasks show that the proposed strategy consistently outperforms various prompt tuning baselines and is on par with other efficient transfer learning methods such as Compacter while tuning far fewer model parameters.

In this paper, we introduce UnifiedM2, a general-purpose misinformation model that jointly models multiple domains of misinformation with a single, unified setup. The model is trained to handle four tasks: detecting news bias, clickbait, fake news, and verifying rumors. By grouping these tasks together, UnifiedM2 learns a richer representation of misinformation, which leads to state-of-the-art or comparable performance across all tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that UnifiedM2’s learned representation is helpful for few-shot learning of unseen misinformation tasks/datasets and the model’s generalizability to unseen events.

Current NLP models are predominantly trained through a two-stage “pre-train then fine-tune” pipeline. Prior work has shown that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage, using heuristic masking policies for masked language modeling (MLM), can significantly improve final performance. However, it is still unclear (1) in what cases such intermediate pre-training is helpful, (2) whether hand-crafted heuristic objectives are optimal for a given task, and (3) whether a masking policy designed for one task is generalizable beyond that task. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to investigate the effect of various masking policies in intermediate pre-training with nine selected tasks across three categories. Crucially, we introduce methods to automate the discovery of optimal masking policies via direct supervision or meta-learning. We conclude that the success of intermediate pre-training is dependent on appropriate pre-train corpus, selection of output format (i.e., masked spans or full sentence), and clear understanding of the role that MLM plays for the downstream task. In addition, we find our learned masking policies outperform the heuristic of masking named entities on TriviaQA, and policies learned from one task can positively transfer to other tasks in certain cases, inviting future research in this direction.

Recent work has suggested that language models (LMs) store both common-sense and factual knowledge learned from pre-training data. In this paper, we leverage this implicit knowledge to create an effective end-to-end fact checker using a solely a language model, without any external knowledge or explicit retrieval components. While previous work on extracting knowledge from LMs have focused on the task of open-domain question answering, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to examine the use of language models as fact checkers. In a closed-book setting, we show that our zero-shot LM approach outperforms a random baseline on the standard FEVER task, and that our finetuned LM compares favorably with standard baselines. Though we do not ultimately outperform methods which use explicit knowledge bases, we believe our exploration shows that this method is viable and has much room for exploration.

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training samples used in the downstream task. On several text classification tasks, we show that as the number of training examples grow into the millions, the accuracy gap between finetuning BERT-based model and training vanilla LSTM from scratch narrows to within 1%. Our findings indicate that MLM-based models might reach a diminishing return point as the supervised data size increases significantly.

We present BlockBERT, a lightweight and efficient BERT model for better modeling long-distance dependencies. Our model extends BERT by introducing sparse block structures into the attention matrix to reduce both memory consumption and training/inference time, which also enables attention heads to capture either short- or long-range contextual information. We conduct experiments on language model pre-training and several benchmark question answering datasets with various paragraph lengths. BlockBERT uses 18.7-36.1% less memory and 12.0-25.1% less time to learn the model. During testing, BlockBERT saves 27.8% inference time, while having comparable and sometimes better prediction accuracy, compared to an advanced BERT-based model, RoBERTa.