In recent years, there has been a growing interest in utilizing external knowledge to reduce hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) and provide them with updated information. Despite this improvement, a major challenge lies in the lack of explicit citations, which hampers the ability to verify the information generated by these models.This paper focuses on providing models with citation capabilities efficiently. By constructing a dataset of citations, we train two model architectures: an FID-style FLAN-T5 model for efficient answer composition and a 13B model known for its success in instruction following after tuning. Evaluation on fluency, correctness, and citation quality is conducted through human assessment and the newly introduced Automatic LLMs’ Citation Evaluation (ALCE) benchmark.Results demonstrate significant improvements in answer quality and efficiency, surpassing the performance of the popular ChatGPT on some of the metrics. The models exhibit exceptional out-of-domain generalization in both human and automatic evaluation. Notably, the FID-style FLAN-T5 model with only 3B parameters performs impressively compared to the 13B model.

Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this work, we present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. AraMUS achieves state-of-the-art performances on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. Moreover, AraMUS shows impressive few-shot learning abilities compared with the best existing Arabic PLMs.

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work addresses two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs that limit the progress of the Arabic NLU and NLG fields. First, existing Arabic PLMs are not well-explored and their pre-training can be improved significantly using a more methodical approach. Second, there is a lack of systematic and reproducible evaluation of these models in the literature. We revisit both the pre-training and evaluation of Arabic PLMs. In terms of pre-training, we explore the impact of the quality of the pretraining data, the size of the model, and the incorporation of character-level information on Arabic PLM. As a result, we release three new Arabic BERT-style models ( JABER, Char-JABER, and SABER), and two T5-style models (AT5S and AT5B). In terms of evaluation, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of existing state-of-the-art models on ALUE, a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU tasks, and on a subset of the Arabic generative tasks. We show that our models significantly outperform existing Arabic PLMs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on discriminative and generative Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. Our models and source code to reproduce results will be made available upon acceptance.

Intermediate layer matching is shown as an effective approach for improving knowledge distillation (KD). However, this technique applies matching in the hidden spaces of two different networks (i.e. student and teacher), which lacks clear interpretability. Moreover, intermediate layer KD cannot easily deal with other problems such as layer mapping search and architecture mismatch (i.e. it requires the teacher and student to be of the same model type). To tackle the aforementioned problems all together, we propose Universal-KD to match intermediate layers of the teacher and the student in the output space (by adding pseudo classifiers on intermediate layers) via the attention-based layer projection. By doing this, our unified approach has three merits: (i) it can be flexibly combined with current intermediate layer distillation techniques to improve their results (ii) the pseudo classifiers of the teacher can be deployed instead of extra expensive teacher assistant networks to address the capacity gap problem in KD which is a common issue when the gap between the size of the teacher and student networks becomes too large; (iii) it can be used in cross-architecture intermediate layer KD. We did comprehensive experiments in distilling BERT-base into BERT-4, RoBERTa-large into DistilRoBERTa and BERT-base into CNN and LSTM-based models. Results on the GLUE tasks show that our approach is able to outperform other KD techniques.

With the growth of computing power neural machine translation (NMT) models also grow accordingly and become better. However, they also become harder to deploy on edge devices due to memory constraints. To cope with this problem, a common practice is to distill knowledge from a large and accurately-trained teacher network (T) into a compact student network (S). Although knowledge distillation (KD) is useful in most cases, our study shows that existing KD techniques might not be suitable enough for deep NMT engines, so we propose a novel alternative. In our model, besides matching T and S predictions we have a combinatorial mechanism to inject layer-level supervision from T to S. In this paper, we target low-resource settings and evaluate our translation engines for Portuguese→English, Turkish→English, and English→German directions. Students trained using our technique have 50% fewer parameters and can still deliver comparable results to those of 12-layer teachers.