Data-Efficient Finetuning Using Cross-Task Nearest Neighbors

Recent NLP models have shown the remarkable ability to effectively generalise `zero-shot' to new tasks using only natural language instructions as guidance. However, many of these approaches suffer from high computational costs due to their reliance on concatenating lengthy instructions with every input example, resulting in costly reprocessing of the instruction. To avoid this, we introduce Hypernetworks for INstruction Tuning (HINT), which convert task instructions and examples into parameter-efficient modules inserted into an underlying model using a pretrained text encoder, eliminating the need to include instructions in the model input. The hypernetwork in HINT also produces an encoded instruction, which we concatenate with encoded inputs during decoding to further improve performance. HINT models outperform strong state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% when controlling for compute (measured in FLOPs). By converting instructions into modules, HINT models can effectively disregard the length of instructions and few-shot example inputs in terms of compute usage. As a result, HINT can enhance its performance by up to 25% by incorporating additional few-shot data, while utilizing only up to 5% more compute. This combines the strengths of parameter-efficient fine-tuning and in-context learning.

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HINT: Hypernetwork Instruction Tuning for Efficient Zero- and Few-Shot Generalisation

Large pre-trained models are capable of few-shot in-context learning (ICL), i.e., performing a new task by prepending a few demonstrations before the test input. However, the concatenated demonstrations are often excessively long and induce additional computation. Inspired by fusion-in-decoder (FiD) models which efficiently aggregate more passages and thus outperforms concatenation-based models in open-domain QA, we hypothesize that similar techniques can be applied to improve the efficiency and end-task performance of ICL. To verify this, we present a comprehensive study on applying three fusion methodsconcatenation-based (early fusion), FiD (intermediate), and ensemble-based (late)to ICL. We adopt a meta-learning setup where a model is first trained to perform ICL on a mixture of tasks using one selected fusion method, then evaluated on held-out tasks for ICL. Results on 11 held-out tasks show that FiD ICL matches or outperforms the other two fusion methods. Additionally, we show that FiD ICL (1) is 10x faster at inference time compared to concat-based and ensemble-based ICL, as we can easily pre-compute the representations of in-context examples and reuse them; (2) enables scaling up to meta-training 3B-sized models, which would fail for concat-based ICL.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/c50ddada-d92b-41a6-b16b-4ee57b384163" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

FiD-ICL: A Fusion-in-Decoder Approach for Efficient In-Context Learning

Obtaining labeled data to train a model for a task of interest is often expensive. Prior work shows training models on multitask data augmented with task descriptions (prompts) effectively transfers knowledge to new tasks. Towards efficiently building task-specific models, we assume access to a small number (32-1000) of unlabeled target-task examples and use those to retrieve the most similar labeled examples from a large pool of multitask data augmented with prompts. Compared to the current practice of finetuning models on uniformly sampled prompted multitask data (e.g.: FLAN, T0), our approach of finetuning on cross-task nearest neighbors is significantly more data-efficient. Using only 2% of the data from the P3 pool without any labeled target-task data, our models outperform strong baselines trained on all available data by 3-30% on 12 out of 14 datasets representing held-out tasks including legal and scientific document QA. Similarly, models trained on cross-task nearest neighbors from SuperNaturalInstructions, representing about 5\% of the pool, obtain comparable performance to state-of-the-art models on 12 held-out tasks from that pool. Moreover, the models produced by our approach also provide a better initialization than single multitask finetuned models for few-shot finetuning on target-task data, as shown by a 2-23% relative improvement over few-shot finetuned T0-3B models on 8 datasets.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a diverse body of scientific literature that is challenging to navigate, stimulating interest in automated tools to help find useful knowledge. We pursue the construction of a knowledge base (KB) of mechanisms -- a fundamental concept across the sciences, which encompasses activities, functions and causal relations, ranging from cellular processes to economic impacts. We extract this information from the natural language of scientific papers by developing a broad, unified schema that strikes a balance between relevance and breadth. We annotate a dataset of mechanisms with our schema and train a model to extract mechanism relations from papers. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of our KB in supporting interdisciplinary scientific search over COVID-19 literature, outperforming the prominent PubMed search in a study with clinical experts. Our search engine, dataset and code are publicly available at https://covidmechanisms.apps.allenai.org/ .

Extracting a Knowledge Base of Mechanisms from COVID-19 Papers

The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2023) will be hosted by ACL 2023 and held on 13 July 2023. The workshop is being organised by Burcu Can, Maximilian Mozes, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Naomi Saphra, Nora Kassner, Shauli Ravfogel, Abhilasha Ravichander, and  Chen Zhao; and advised by Isabelle Augenstein, Anna Rogers, Kyunghyun Cho, and Edward Grefenstette. The workshop is organised by the ACL Special Interest Group on Representation Learning (SIGREP).

The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP aims to continue the success of the Repl4NLP workshop series, with the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP having received about 50 submissions and over 250 attendees - the second most attended collocated event at ACL'16 after WMT. The workshop was introduced as a synthesis of several years of independent CL workshops focusing on vector space models of meaning, compositionality, and the application of deep neural networks and spectral methods to NLP. It provides a forum for discussing recent advances on these topics, as well as future research directions in linguistically motivated vector-based models in NLP. The workshop will take place in a hybrid setting, and, as in previous years, feature interdisciplinary keynotes, paper presentations, posters, as well as a panel discussion.<br>
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W5: The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP)

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13A-Oral: NLP Applications

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2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Data-Efficient Finetuning Using Cross-Task Nearest Neighbors

HINT: Hypernetwork Instruction Tuning for Efficient Zero- and Few-Shot Generalisation

FiD-ICL: A Fusion-in-Decoder Approach for Efficient In-Context Learning

Data-Efficient Finetuning Using Cross-Task Nearest Neighbors

Extracting a Knowledge Base of Mechanisms from COVID-19 Papers

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