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Multilingual neural machine translation has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years. However, the long-tailed distribution of multilingual corpora poses a challenge of Pareto optimization, i.e., optimizing for some languages may come at the cost of degrading the performance of others.Existing balancing training strategies are equivalent to a series of Pareto optimal solutions, which trade off on a Pareto frontier\footnote{In Pareto optimization, Pareto optimal solutions refer to solutions in which none of the objectives can be improved without sacrificing at least one of the other objectives. The set of all Pareto optimal solutions forms a Pareto frontier.}.In this work, we propose a new training framework, Pareto Mutual Distillation (Pareto-MD), towards pushing the Pareto frontier outwards rather than making trade-offs.Specifically, Pareto-MD collaboratively trains two Pareto optimal solutions that favor different languages and allows them to learn from the strengths of each other via knowledge distillation.Furthermore, we introduce a novel strategy to enable stronger communication between Pareto optimal solutions and broaden the applicability of our approach. Experimental results on the widely-used WMT and TED datasets show that our method significantly pushes the Pareto frontier and outperforms baselines by up to +2.46 BLEU\footnote{Our code will be released upon acceptance.}.

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ACL 2023

Towards Higher Pareto Frontier in Multilingual Machine Translation

mutual distillation

mutlilingual

neural machine translation

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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Multilingual neural machine translation has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years. However, the long-tailed distribution of multilingual corpora poses a challenge of Pareto optimization, i.e., optimizing for some languages may come at the cost of degrading the performance of others.Existing balancing training strategies are equivalent to a series of Pareto optimal solutions, which trade off on a Pareto frontier\footnote{In Pareto optimization, Pareto optimal solutions refer to solutions in which none of the objectives can be improved without sacrificing at least one of the other objectives. The set of all Pareto optimal solutions forms a Pareto frontier.}.In this work, we propose a new training framework, Pareto Mutual Distillation (Pareto-MD), towards pushing the Pareto frontier outwards rather than making trade-offs.Specifically, Pareto-MD collaboratively trains two Pareto optimal solutions that favor different languages and allows them to learn from the strengths of each other via knowledge distillation.Furthermore, we introduce a novel strategy to enable stronger communication between Pareto optimal solutions and broaden the applicability of our approach. Experimental results on the widely-used WMT and TED datasets show that our method significantly pushes the Pareto frontier and outperforms baselines by up to +2.46 BLEU\footnote{Our code will be released upon acceptance.}.

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technical paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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Multilingual machine translation models can benefit from synergy between different language pairs, but also suffer from interference. While there is a growing number of sophisticated methods that aim to eliminate interference, our understanding of interference as a phenomenon is still limited. This work identifies the main factors that contribute to interference in multilingual machine translation. Through systematic experimentation, we find that interference (or synergy) are primarily determined by model size, data size, and the proportion of each language pair within the total dataset. We observe that substantial interference occurs mainly when the model is very small with respect to the available training data, and that using standard transformer configurations with less than one billion parameters largely alleviates interference and promotes synergy. Moreover, we show that tuning the sampling temperature to control the proportion of each language pair in the data is key to balancing the amount of interference between low and high resource language pairs effectively, and can lead to superior performance overall.

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Causes and Cures for Interference in Multilingual Translation

Adaptive learning aims to provide customized educational activities (e.g., exercises) to ad- dress individual learning needs. However, the manual construction and delivery of such activities is a laborious process. In this paper, we study a novel task of adaptive and personalized exercise generation for online language learning. We combine a knowledge tracing model that estimates each student's evolving knowledge states from their learning history and a controlled text generation model that generates exercise sentences based on the student's current estimated knowledge state and instructor requirements of desired properties (e.g., do-main knowledge and difficulty). We train and evaluate our model on real-world learner in- interaction data from Duolingo and demonstrate that LMs guided by student states can generate superior exercises. Then, we discuss the potential use of our model in educational applications using various simulations. These simulations show that our model can adapt to students' individual abilities and can facilitate their learning efficiency by personalizing learn- ing sequences.

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Adaptive and Personalized Exercise Generation for Online Language Learning

Detecting commonsense causal relations (causation) between events has long been an essential yet challenging task. Given that events are complicated, an event may have different causes under various contexts. Thus, exploiting context plays an essential role in detecting causal relations. Meanwhile, previous works about commonsense causation only consider two events and ignore their context, simplifying the task formulation. This paper proposes a new task to detect commonsense causation between two events in an event sequence (i.e., context), called contextualized commonsense causal reasoning. We also design a zero-shot framework: COLA (Contextualized Commonsense Causality Reasoner) to solve the task from the causal inference perspective. This framework obtains rich incidental supervision from temporality and balances covariates from multiple timestamps to remove confounding effects. Our extensive experiments show that COLA can detect commonsense causality more accurately than baselines.

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COLA: Contextualized Commonsense Causal Reasoning from the Causal Inference Perspective

We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based method for modifying $n$-best lists produced by a machine translation (MT) system. Our method offers an innovative approach to improving MT quality and identifying weaknesses in evaluation metrics. Using common GA operations (mutation and crossover) on a list of hypotheses in combination with a fitness function (an arbitrary MT metric), we obtain novel and diverse outputs with high metric scores. With a combination of multiple MT metrics as the fitness function, the proposed method leads to an increase in translation quality as measured by other held-out automatic metrics.With a single metric (including popular ones such as COMET) as the fitness function, we find blind spots and flaws in the metric. This allows for an automated search for adversarial examples in an arbitrary metric, without prior assumptions on the form of such example. As a demonstration of the method, we create datasets of adversarial examples and use them to show that reference-free COMET is substantially less robust than the reference-based version.

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Breeding Machine Translations: Evolutionary approach to survive and thrive in the world of automated evaluation

Commonsense reasoning, aiming at endowing machines with a human-like ability to make situational presumptions, is extremely challenging to generalize.For someone who barely knows about "meditation," while is knowledgeable about "singing," he can still infer that "meditation makes people relaxed" from the existing knowledge that "singing makes people relaxed" by first conceptualizing "singing" as a "relaxing event" and then instantiating that event to "meditation."This process, known as conceptual induction and deduction, is fundamental to commonsense reasoning while lacking both labeled data and methodologies to enhance commonsense modeling.To fill such a research gap, we propose CAT (Contextualized ConceptuAlization and InsTantiation),a semi-supervised learning framework that integrates event conceptualization and instantiation to conceptualize commonsense knowledge bases at scale.Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performances on two conceptualization tasks, and the acquired abstract commonsense knowledge can significantly improve commonsense inference modeling.Our code, data, and fine-tuned models are publicly available at [https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAT](https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAT).

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CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning

The out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words are difficult to represent while critical to the performance of embedding-based downstream models. Prior OOV word embedding learning methods failed to model complex word formation well. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based relation mining method, namely GRM, for OOV word embedding learning. We first build a Word Relationship Graph (WRG) based on word formation and associate OOV words with their semantically relevant words, which can mine the relational information inside word structures. Subsequently, our GRM can infer high-quality embeddings for OOV words through passing and aggregating semantic attributes and relational information in the WRG, regardless of contextual richness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both intrinsic and downstream tasks when faced with OOV words.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/06cafbbb-13d3-464e-b9a2-ccc56007396b" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Graph-based Relation Mining for Context-free Out-of-vocabulary Word Embedding Learning

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of correcting typos, spelling, punctuation and grammatical issues in text. Approaching the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, we compare the use of a common subword unit vocabulary and byte-level encoding. Initial synthetic training data is created using an error-generating pipeline, and used for finetuning two subword-level models and one byte-level model. Models are then finetuned further on hand-corrected error corpora, including texts written by children, university students, dyslexic and second-language writers, and evaluated over different error types and error origins. We show that a byte-level model enables higher correction quality than a subword approach, not only for simple spelling errors, but also for more complex semantic, stylistic and grammatical issues. In particular, initial training on synthetic corpora followed by finetuning on a relatively small parallel corpus of real-world errors helps the byte-level model correct a wide range of commonly occurring errors. Our experiments are run for the Icelandic language but should hold for other similar languages, and in particular to morphologically rich ones.

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Byte-Level Grammatical Error Correction Using Synthetic and Curated Corpora

This paper presents a whitening-based contrastive learning method for sentence embedding learning (WhitenedCSE), which combines contrastive learning with a novel shuffled group whitening. Generally, contrastive learning pulls distortions of a single sample (i.e., positive samples) close and push negative samples far away, correspondingly facilitating the alignment and uniformity in the feature space. A popular alternative to the "pushing'' operation is whitening the feature space, which scatters all the samples for uniformity. Since the whitening and the contrastive learning have large redundancy w.r.t. the uniformity, they are usually used separately and do not easily work together. For the first time, this paper integrates whitening into the contrastive learning scheme and facilitates two benefits. 1) Better uniformity. We find that these two approaches are not totally redundant but actually have some complementarity due to different uniformity mechanism. 2) Better alignment. We randomly divide the feature into multiple groups along the channel axis and perform whitening independently within each group. By shuffling the group division, we derive multiple distortions of a single sample and thus increase the positive sample diversity. Consequently, using multiple positive samples with enhanced diversity further improves contrastive learning due to better alignment. Extensive experiments on seven semantic textual similarity tasks show our method achieves consistent improvement over the contrastive learning baseline and sets new states of the art, e.g., 78.78\% (+2.53\% based on BERT\ba) Spearman correlation on STS tasks.

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WhitenedCSE: Whitening-based Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings

Factual correctness is often the limiting factor in practical applications of natural language generation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. An essential requirement for maintaining factuality is the ability to deal with rare tokens. This paper focuses on rare tokens that appear in both the source and the reference sequences, and which, when missed during generation, decrease the factual correctness of the output text. For high-stake domains that are also knowledge-rich, we show how to use knowledge to (a) identify which rare tokens that appear in both source and reference are important and (b) uplift their conditional probability. We introduce the ``utilization rate'' that encodes knowledge and serves as a regularizer by maximizing the marginal probability of selected tokens. We present a study in a knowledge-rich domain of healthcare, where we tackle the problem of generating after-visit care instructions based on patient-doctor dialogues. We verify that, in our dataset, specific medical concepts with high utilization rates are underestimated by conventionally trained sequence-to-sequence models. We observe that correcting this with our approach to knowledge injection reduces the uncertainty of the model as well as improves factuality and coherence without negatively impacting fluency.

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Injecting knowledge into language generation: a case study in auto-charting after-visit care instructions from medical dialogue

Against the backdrop of the ever-improving Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, recent efforts have focused on the suitability of the current NLI datasets and on the feasibility of the NLI task as it is currently approached. Many of the recent studies have exposed the inherent human disagreements of the inference task and have proposed a shift from categorical labels to human subjective probability assessments, capturing human uncertainty. In this work, we show how neither the current task formulation nor the proposed uncertainty gradient are entirely suitable for solving the NLI challenges. Instead, we propose an ordered sense space annotation, which distinguishes between logical and common-sense inference. One end of the space captures non-sensical inferences, while the other end represents strictly logical scenarios. In the middle of the space, we find a continuum of common-sense, namely, the subjective and graded opinion of a “person on the street.” To arrive at the proposed annotation scheme, we perform a careful investigation of the SICK corpus and we create a taxonomy of annotation issues and guidelines. We re-annotate the corpus with the proposed annotation scheme, utilizing four symbolic inference systems, and then perform a thorough evaluation of the scheme by fine-tuning and testing commonly used pre-trained language models on the re-annotated SICK within various settings. We also pioneer a crowd annotation of a small portion of the MultiNLI corpus, showcasing that it is possible to adapt our scheme for annotation by non-experts on another NLI corpus. Our work shows the efficiency and benefits of the proposed mechanism and opens the way for a careful NLI task refinement.

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Causes and Cures for Interference in Multilingual Translation

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