United Arab Emirates

Multimodal tasks in the fashion domain have significant potential for e-commerce, but involve challenging vision-and-language learning problems—e.g., retrieving a fashion item given a reference image plus text feedback from a user. Prior works on multimodal fashion tasks have either been limited by the data in individual benchmarks, or have leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. Additionally, these works have mainly been restricted to multimodal understanding tasks. To address these gaps, we make two key contributions. First, we propose a novel fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. We show the triplet-based tasks are an effective addition to standard multimodal pre-training tasks. Second, we propose a flexible decoder-based model architecture capable of both fashion retrieval and captioning tasks. Together, our model design and pre-training approach are competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, image retrieval with text feedback, image captioning, relative image captioning, and multimodal categorization.

EMNLP 2022

FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning

fashion domain

vision-and-language pre-training

multimodal learning

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Discontinuous constituency parsing is still kept developing for its efficiency and accuracy are far behind its continuous counterparts. Motivated by the observation that a discontinuous constituent tree can be simply transformed into a pseudo-continuous one by artificially reordering words in the sentence, we propose a novel reordering method, thereby construct fast and accurate discontinuous constituency parsing systems working in continuous way. Specifically, we model the relative position changes of words as a list of actions. By parsing and performing this actions, the corresponding pseudo-continuous sequence is derived. Discontinuous parse tree can be further inferred via integrating a high-performance pseudo-continuous constituency parser. Our systems are evaluated on three classical discontinuous constituency treebanks, achieving new state-of-the-art on two treebanks and showing a distinct advantage in speed.

Reorder and then Parse, Fast and Accurate Discontinuous Constituency Parsing

Thanks to the development of pre-trained language models, multitask learning (MTL) methods achieve a great success in natural language understanding area.
However, current MTL methods pay more attention to task selection or model design to fuse as much knowledge as possible, while intrinsic task correlation is often neglected. It is important to learn sharing strategy among multiple tasks rather than sharing everything.
%The MTL model is directly shared among all the tasks. 
%For example, in traditional MTL methods, the last classification layers or the decoder layers are manually separated. More deeply, 
In this paper, we propose AdapterShare, an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. AdapterShare is automatically learned based on the gradients on tiny held-out validation data. Compared to single-task learning and fully shared MTL methods, our proposed method obtains obvious performance improvement. Compared to the existing MTL method AdapterFusion, AdapterShare achieves absolute 1.90 average points improvement on five dialogue understanding tasks and 2.33 points gain on NLU tasks.

AdapterShare: Task Correlation Modeling with Adapter Differentiation

Knowledge distillation has been proven effective when customizing small language models for specific tasks. Here, a corpus as `textbook' plays an indispensable role, only through which the teacher can teach the student. Prevailing methods adopt a two-stage distillation paradigm: general distillation first with task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation next with augmented task-specific corpus. We argue that such a paradigm may not be optimal. In general distillation, it's extravagant to let the diverse but desultory general knowledge overwhelms the limited model capacity of the student. While in task-specific distillation, the task corpus is usually limited and narrow, preventing the student from learning enough knowledge. To mitigate the issues in the two gapped corpora, we present a better textbook for the student to learn: contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval. Experimental results on GLUE benchmark demonstrate that contextualized corpus is the better textbook compared with jointly using general corpus and augmented task-specific corpus. Surprisingly, it enables task-specific distillation from scratch without general distillation while maintaining comparable performance, making it more flexible to customize the student model with desired model size under various computation constraints.

Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook

Recently there has been an emerging interest in unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training (VLP) that learns multimodal representations without parallel image-caption data. These pioneering works significantly reduce the cost of VLP on data collection and achieve promising results compared to supervised VLP. However, existing unsupervised VLP methods take as input pre-extracted region-based visual features from external object detectors, which both limits flexibility and reduces computational efficiency. In this paper, we explore end-to-end unsupervised VLP with a vision encoder to directly encode images. The vision encoder is pre-trained on image-only data and jointly optimized during multimodal pre-training. To further enhance the learned cross-modal features, we propose a novel pre-training task that predicts which patches contain an object referred to in natural language from the encoded visual features. Extensive experiments on four vision-and-language tasks show that our approach outperforms previous unsupervised VLP methods and obtains new state-of-the-art results.

End-to-End Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Referring Expression Matching

Recently, powerful Transformer architectures have proven superior in generating high-quality sentences. Nevertheless, these models tend to produce dull high-frequency phrases, severely hurting the diversity and novelty of generated text. In this work, we dig into the intrinsic mechanism of this problem and found that sparser attention values in Transformer could improve diversity. To understand such a phenomenon, we first conduct both empirical and theoretical analysis and then attribute it to representation degeneration caused by the attentive mixture of the hidden states during training. We term this process the Trap of Mediocrity. To escape from such a trap, we introduce a novel attention regularization loss to control the sharpness of the attention distribution, which is transparent to model structures and can be easily implemented within 20 lines of python code. We prove that this method could be mathematically regarded as learning a Bayesian approximation of posterior attention. Experiments show that our method improved the diversity and novelty of the generated text while maintaining comparable quality on a variety of conditional and unconditional generation tasks.

Evade the Trap of Mediocrity: Promoting Diversity and Novelty in Text Generation via Concentrating Attention

Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers. Previous efforts on curating scientific TLDR datasets failed to scale up due to the heavy human annotation and domain expertise required. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to automatically extracting TLDR summaries for scientific papers from their citation texts. Based on the proposed approach, we create a new benchmark CiteSum without human annotation, which is around 30 times larger than the previous human-curated dataset SciTLDR. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of CiteSum, examining its data characteristics and establishing strong baselines. We further demonstrate the usefulness of CiteSum by adapting models pre-trained on CiteSum (named CITES) to new tasks and domains with limited supervision. For scientific extreme summarization, CITES outperforms most fully-supervised methods on SciTLDR without any fine-tuning and obtains state-of-the-art results with only 128 examples. For news extreme summarization, CITES achieves significant gains on XSum over its base model (not pre-trained on CiteSum), e.g., +7.2 ROUGE-1 zero-shot performance and state-of-the-art few-shot performance. For news headline generation, CITES performs the best among unsupervised and zero-shot methods on Gigaword.

CiteSum: Citation Text-guided Scientific Extreme Summarization and Domain Adaptation with Limited Supervision

While Indic NLP has made rapid advances recently in terms of the availability of corpora and pre-trained models, benchmark datasets on standard NLU tasks are limited. To this end, we introduce INDICXNLI, an NLI dataset for 11 Indic languages. It has been created by high-quality machine translation of the original English XNLI dataset and our analysis attests to the quality of INDICXNLI. By finetuning different pre-trained LMs on this INDICXNLI, we analyze various cross-lingual transfer techniques with respect to the impact of the choice of language models, languages, multi-linguality, mix-language input, etc. These experiments provide us with useful insights into the behaviour of pre-trained models for a diverse set of languages.

IndicXNLI: Evaluating Multilingual Inference for Indian Languages

Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition the frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. While prompt tuning has gradually reached the performance level of fine-tuning as the model scale increases, there is still a large performance gap between prompt tuning and fine-tuning for models of moderate and small scales (typically less than 11B parameters). In this paper, we empirically show that the trained prompt tokens can have a negative impact on a downstream task and thus degrade its performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale (XPrompt) under the regime of lottery tickets hypothesis. Specifically, XPrompt eliminates the negative prompt tokens at different granularity levels through a hierarchical structured pruning, yielding a more parameter-efficient prompt yet with a competitive performance. Comprehensive experiments are carried out on the SuperGLUE tasks, and the results indicate that XPrompt is able to close the performance gap at smaller model scales.

XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning

The large population of home cooks with dietary restrictions is under-served by existing cooking resources and recipe generation models. To help them, we propose the task of controllable recipe editing: adapt a base recipe to satisfy a user-specified dietary constraint. This task is challenging, and cannot be adequately solved with human-written ingredient substitution rules or existing end-to-end recipe generation models. We tackle this problem with SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing, which performs simultaneous ingredient substitution before generating natural-language steps using the edited ingredients. By decoupling ingredient and step editing, our step generator can explicitly integrate the available ingredients. Experiments on the novel RecipePairs dataset---83K pairs of similar recipes where each recipe satisfies one of seven dietary constraints---demonstrate that SHARE produces convincing, coherent recipes that are appropriate for a target dietary constraint. We further show through human evaluations and real-world cooking trials that recipes edited by SHARE can be easily followed by home cooks to create appealing dishes.

SHARE: a System for Hierarchical Assistive Recipe Editing

Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) is a challenging VQA task that requires retrieval of external knowledge to answer questions about images. Recent OK-VQA systems use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve documents from external knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia, but with DPR trained separately from answer generation, introducing a potential limit on the overall system performance.
Instead, we propose a joint training scheme which includes differentiable DPR integrated with answer generation so that the system can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. Our experiments show that our scheme outperforms recent OK-VQA systems with strong DPR for retrieval. We also introduce new diagnostic metrics to analyze how retrieval and generation interact. The strong retrieval ability of our model significantly reduces the number of retrieved documents needed in training, yielding significant benefits in answer quality and computation required for training.

FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning

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Reorder and then Parse, Fast and Accurate Discontinuous Constituency Parsing

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