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Personalized dialogue agents (DAs) powered by large pre-trained language models (PLMs) often rely on explicit persona descriptions to maintain personality consistency. However, such descriptions may not always be available or may pose privacy concerns. To tackle this bottleneck, we introduce PersonaPKT, a lightweight transfer learning approach that can build persona-consistent dialogue models without explicit persona descriptions. By representing each persona as a continuous vector, PersonaPKT learns implicit persona-specific features directly from a small number of dialogue samples produced by the same persona, adding less than 0.1% trainable parameters for each persona on top of the PLM backbone. Empirical results demonstrate that PersonaPKT effectively builds personalized DAs with high storage efficiency, outperforming various baselines in terms of persona consistency while maintaining good response generation quality. In addition, it enhances privacy protection by avoiding explicit persona descriptions. Overall, PersonaPKT is an effective solution for creating personalized DAs that respect user privacy.

ACL 2023

PersonaPKT: Building Personalized Dialogue Agents via Parameter-efficient Knowledge Transfer

personalized dialogue agents; parameter-efficient tuning; parameter-efficient knowledge transfer

workshop paper

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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Autocomplete is a task where the user inputs a piece of text, termed prompt, which is conditioned by the model to generate semantically coherent continuation. Existing works for this task have primarily focused on datasets (e.g., email, chat) with high frequency user prompt patterns (or focused prompts) where word-based language models have been quite effective. In this work, we study the more challenging open-domain setting consisting of low frequency user prompt patterns (or broad prompts, e.g., prompt about 93rd academy awards) and demonstrate the effectiveness of character-based language models. We study this problem under memory-constrained settings (e.g., edge devices and smartphones), where character-based representation is effective in reducing the overall model size (in terms of parameters). We use WikiText-103 benchmark to simulate broad prompts and demonstrate that character models rival word models in exact match accuracy for the autocomplete task, when controlled for the model size. For instance, we show that a 20M parameter character model performs similar to an 80M parameter word model in the vanilla setting. We further propose novel methods to improve character models by incorporating inductive bias in the form of compositional information and representation transfer from large word models.

Small Character Models Match Large Word Models for Autocomplete Under Memory Constraints
Ganesh Jawahar, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Debadeepta Dey, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, V.S., Caio Mendes, Gustavo de Rosa and Shital Shah (ganeshjwhr@gmail.com)
Status: Accept

The information retrieval community has made significant progress in improving the efficiency of Dual Encoder (DE) dense passage retrieval systems, making them suitable for latency-sensitive settings. However, many proposed procedures are often too complex or resource-intensive, which makes it difficult for practitioners to adopt them or identify sources of empirical gains. Therefore, in this work, we propose a trivially simple recipe to serve as a baseline method for boosting the efficiency of DE retrievers leveraging an asymmetric architecture. Our results demonstrate that even a 2-layer, BERT-based query encoder can still retain 92.5% of the full DE performance on the BEIR benchmark via unsupervised distillation and proper student initialization. We hope that our findings will encourage the community to re-evaluate the trade-offs between method complexity and performance improvements.

Query Embedding Alignment: a Trivially Simple Recipe to Boost Dense Passage Retrieval Efficiency
Yuxuan Wang and Lyu Hong (wangy49@seas.upenn.edu)
Status: Accept

For many languages and applications, even though enough data is available for training Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) systems, few off-the-shelf models are available for use in practice. This is due to both the large size of state-of-the-art models, and to the computational requirements for recreating them from scratch. However, we observe that in practice, acceptable models can be trained and run with far fewer resources. In this work, we intro- duce MiniNED, a framework for creating small NED models from medium-sized datasets. The resulting models can be tuned for application- specific objectives and trade-offs, depending on practitioners’ requirements concerning model size, frequency bias, and out-of-domain gener- alization. We evaluate the framework in nine languages, and achieve reasonable performance using models that are a fraction of the size of recent work.

Minimalist Entity Disambiguation for Mid-Resource Languages
Benno Kruit (b.b.kruit@vu.nl)
Status: Accept

Cross-Lingual Retrieval Augmented Prompt for Low-Resource Languages

Recent work has shown that infusing layout features into language models (LMs) improves processing of visually-rich documents such as scientific papers. Layout-infused LMs are often evaluated on documents with familiar layout features (e.g., papers from the same publisher), but in practice models encounter documents with unfamiliar distributions of layout features, such as new combinations of text sizes and styles, or new spatial configurations of textual elements. In this work we test whether layout-infused LMs are robust to layout distribution shifts. As a case study we use the task of scientific document structure recovery, segmenting a scientific paper into its structural categories (e.g., "title", "caption", "reference"). To emulate distribution shifts that occur in practice we re-partition the GROTOAP2 dataset. We find that under layout distribution shifts model performance degrades by up to 20 F1. Simple training strategies, such as increasing training diversity, can reduce this degradation by over 35% relative F1; however, models fail to reach in-distribution performance in any tested out-of-distribution conditions. This work highlights the need to consider layout distribution shifts during model evaluation, and presents a methodology for conducting such evaluations.

Are Layout-Infused Language Models Robust to Layout Distribution Shifts? A Case Study with Scientific Documents

Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) is the task of linking mentions of the same event either within or across documents. Most mention pairs are not coreferent, yet many that are coreferent can be identified through simple techniques such as lemma matching of the event triggers or the sentences in which they appear. Existing methods for training coreference systems sample from a largely skewed distribution, making it difficult for the algorithm to learn coreference beyond surface matching. Additionally, these methods are intractable because of the quadratic operations needed. To address these challenges, we break the problem of ECR into two parts: a) a heuristic to efficiently filter out a large number of non-coreferent pairs, and b) a training approach on a balanced set of coreferent and non-coreferent mention pairs. By following this approach, we show that we get comparable results to the state of the art on two popular ECR datasets while significantly reducing compute requirements. We also analyze the mention pairs that are "hard" to accurately classify as coreferent or non-coreferent.

2*n is better than n^2: Decomposing Event Coreference Resolution into Two Tractable Problems

This paper explores the task of Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) where, given an untrimmed video and a natural language sentence query, the goal is to recognize and determine temporal boundaries of action instances in the video described by the query. Recent works tackled this task by improving query inputs with large pre-trained language models (PLM) at the cost of more expensive training. However, the effects of this integration are unclear, as these works also propose improvements in the visual inputs. Therefore, this paper studies the effects of PLMs in TVG and assesses the applicability of parameter-efficient training with NLP adapters. 
We couple popular PLMs with a selection of existing approaches and test different adapters to reduce the impact of the additional parameters. Our results on three challenging datasets show that, without changing the visual inputs, TVG models greatly benefited from the PLM integration and fine-tuning, stressing the importance of sentence query representation in this task. Furthermore, NLP adapters were an effective alternative to full fine-tuning, even though they were not tailored to our task, allowing PLM integration in larger TVG models and delivering results comparable to SOTA models. Finally, our results shed light on which adapters work best in different scenarios.

Towards Parameter-Efficient Integration of Pre-Trained Language Models In Temporal Video Grounding

Intermediate training of pre-trained transformer-based language models on domain-specific data leads to substantial gains for downstream tasks. To increase efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting alleviated from full domain-adaptive pre-training, approaches such as adapters have been developed. However, these require additional parameters for each layer, and are criticized for their limited expressiveness. In this work, we introduce TADA, a novel task-agnostic domain adaptation method which is modular, parameter-efficient, and thus, data-efficient. Within TADA, we retrain the embeddings to learn domain-aware input representations and tokenizers for the transformer encoder, while freezing all other parameters of the model. Then, task-specific fine-tuning is performed. We further conduct experiments with meta-embeddings and newly introduced meta-tokenizers, resulting in one model per task in multi-domain use cases. Our broad evaluation in 4 downstream tasks for 14 domains across single- and multi-domain setups and high- and low-resource scenarios reveals that TADA is an effective and efficient alternative to full domain-adaptive pre-training and adapters for domain adaptation, while not introducing additional parameters or complex training steps.

TADA: Efficient Task-Agnostic Domain Adaptation for Transformers

Pre-trained encoder-only and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models each have advantages, however training both model types from scratch is computationally expensive. We explore recipes to improve pre-training efficiency by initializing one model from the other. (1) Extracting the encoder from a seq2seq model, we show it under-performs a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) encoder, particularly on sequence labeling tasks. Variations of masking during seq2seq training, reducing the decoder size, and continuing with a small amount of MLM training do not close the gap. (2) Conversely, using an encoder to warm-start seq2seq training, we show that by unfreezing the encoder partway through training, we can match task performance of a from-scratch seq2seq model. Overall, this two-stage approach is an efficient recipe to obtain both a multilingual encoder and a seq2seq model, matching the performance of training each model from scratch while reducing the total compute cost by 27%.

Recipes for Sequential Pre-training of Multilingual Encoder and Seq2Seq Models

Parameter-efficient tuning aims to mitigate the large memory requirements of adapting pretrained language models for downstream tasks. For example, one popular method, prefix-tuning, prepends trainable tokens to sequences while freezing the rest of the model's parameters. Although such models attain comparable performance with fine-tuning when applied to sequences with short to moderate lengths, we show their inferior performance when modelling long sequences. To bridge this gap, we propose prefix-propagation, a simple but effective approach that conditions prefixes on previous hidden states. We empirically demonstrate that prefix-propagation outperforms prefix-tuning across long-document tasks, while using 50% fewer parameters. To further investigate the proposed architecture, we also show its advantage in calibration, and perform additional study on its relationship with kernel attention. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to focus on parameter-efficient learning for long-sequence language tasks.

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Small Character Models Match Large Word Models for Autocomplete Under Memory Constraints Ganesh Jawahar, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Debadeepta Dey, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, V.S., Caio Mendes, Gustavo de Rosa and Shital Shah (ganeshjwhr@gmail.com) Status: Accept

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