Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Language Models (original) (raw)
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mGPT: Few-Shot Learners Go Multilingual
Cornell University - arXiv, 2022
Recent studies report that autoregressive language models can successfully solve many NLP tasks via zero-and few-shot learning paradigms, which opens up new possibilities for using the pre-trained language models. This paper introduces two autoregressive GPT-like models with 1.3 billion and 13 billion parameters trained on 60 languages from 25 language families using Wikipedia and Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. We reproduce the GPT-3 architecture using GPT-2 sources and the sparse attention mechanism; Deepspeed and Megatron frameworks allow us to parallelize the training and inference steps effectively. The resulting models show performance on par with the recently released XGLM models by Facebook, covering more languages and enhancing NLP possibilities for low resource languages of CIS countries and Russian small nations. We detail the motivation for the choices of the architecture design, thoroughly describe the data preparation pipeline, and train five small versions of the model to choose the most optimal multilingual tokenization strategy. We measure the model perplexity in all covered languages, and evaluate it on the wide spectre of multilingual tasks, including classification, generative, sequence labeling and knowledge probing. The models were evaluated with the zero-shot and few-shot methods. Furthermore, we compared the classification tasks with the state-of-the-art multilingual model XGLM. The source code and the mGPT XL model are publicly released. 6 https://tensorflow.org/datasets/ catalog/c4 7 We used the 20201101 dump version for each language.
Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners
2021
This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning—finetuning language models on a collection of datasets described via instructions—substantially boosts zeroshot performance on unseen tasks. We take a 137B parameter pretrained language model and instruction tune it on over 60 NLP datasets verbalized via natural language instruction templates. We evaluate this instruction-tuned model, which we call FLAN, on unseen task types. FLAN substantially improves the performance of its unmodified counterpart and surpasses zero-shot 175B GPT-3 on 20 of 25 datasets that we evaluate. FLAN even outperforms few-shot GPT-3 by a large margin on ANLI, RTE, BoolQ, AI2-ARC, OpenbookQA, and StoryCloze. Ablation studies reveal that number of datasets and model scale are key components to the success of instruction tuning. Target Input (Commonsense Reasoning) keep stack of pillow cases in fridge Inference on unseen task ty...
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries, which are expensive and impractical for low-resource languages. To disengage from these dependencies, researchers have explored training multilingual models on English-only resources and transferring them to low-resource languages. However, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages. To address this issue, we propose Embedding-Push, Attention-Pull, and Robust targets to transfer English embeddings to virtual multilingual embeddings without semantic loss, thereby improving cross-lingual transferability. Experimental results on mBERT and XLM-R demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous works on the zero-shot crosslingual text classification task and can obtain a better multilingual alignment.
Improving Zero-shot Translation with Language-Independent Constraints
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 1: Research Papers)
An important concern in training multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) is to translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e zero-shot translation. Improving this ability kills two birds with one stone by providing an alternative to pivot translation which also allows us to better understand how the model captures information between languages. In this work, we carried out an investigation on this capability of the multilingual NMT models. First, we intentionally create an encoder architecture which is independent with respect to the source language. Such experiments shed light on the ability of NMT encoders to learn multilingual representations, in general. Based on such proof of concept, we were able to design regularization methods into the standard Transformer model, so that the whole architecture becomes more robust in zero-shot conditions. We investigated the behaviour of such models on the standard IWSLT 2017 multilingual dataset. We achieved an average improvement of 2.23 BLEU points across 12 language pairs compared to the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art multilingual system. Additionally, we carry out further experiments in which the effect is confirmed even for language pairs with multiple intermediate pivots.
2021
Pretrained multilingual models are able to perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting, even for languages unseen during pretraining. However, prior work evaluating performance on unseen languages has largely been limited to low-level, syntactic tasks, and it remains unclear if zero-shot learning of high-level, semantic tasks is possible for unseen languages. To explore this question, we present AmericasNLI, an extension of XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) to 10 indigenous languages of the Americas. We conduct experiments with XLM-R, testing multiple zero-shot and translation-based approaches. Additionally, we explore model adaptation via continued pretraining and provide an analysis of the dataset by considering hypothesis-only models. We find that XLM-R's zero-shot performance is poor for all 10 languages, with an average performance of 38.62%. Continued pretraining offers improvements, with an average accuracy of 44.05%. Surprisingly, training on poorly translated data b...
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
2020
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task. While typically task-agnostic in architecture, this method still requires task-specific fine-tuning datasets of thousands or tens of thousands of examples. By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple instructions-something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do. Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art finetuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic. At the same time, we also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora. Finally, we find that GPT-3 can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans. We discuss broader societal impacts of this finding and of GPT-3 in general.
JASMINE: Arabic GPT Models for Few-Shot Learning
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
Task agnostic generative pretraining (GPT) has recently proved promising for zero-and few-shot learning, gradually diverting attention from the expensive supervised learning paradigm. Although the community is accumulating knowledge as to capabilities of English-language autoregressive models such as GPT-3 adopting this generative approach, scholarship about these models remains acutely Anglocentric. Consequently, the community currently has serious gaps in its understanding of this class of models, their potential, and their societal impacts in diverse settings, linguistic traditions, and cultures. To alleviate this issue for Arabic, a collection of diverse languages and language varieties with more than 400 million population, we introduce JASMINE, a suite of powerful Arabic autoregressive Transformer language models ranging in size between 300 million-13 billion parameters. We pretrain our new models with large amounts of diverse data (∼ 400GB of text) from different Arabic varieties and domains. We evaluate JASMINE extensively in both intrinsic and extrinsic settings, using a comprehensive benchmark for zero-and few-shot learning across a wide range of NLP tasks. We also carefully develop and release a novel benchmark for both automated and human evaluation of Arabic autoregressive models focused at investigating potential social biases, harms, and toxicity in these models. We aim to responsibly release our models with interested researchers, along with code for experimenting with them. 1
XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization
ArXiv, 2020
Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark to en...
Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language Understanding
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks: Unidirectional PLMs (e.g., GPT) are well known for their superior text generation capabilities; bidirectional PLMs (e.g., BERT) have been the prominent choice for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While both types of models have achieved promising few-shot learning performance, their potential for zero-shot learning has been underexplored. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses both types of PLMs for fully zero-shot learning of NLU tasks without requiring any task-specific data: A unidirectional PLM generates class-conditioned texts guided by prompts, which are used as the training data for fine-tuning a bidirectional PLM. With quality training data selected based on the generation probability and regularization techniques (label smoothing and temporal ensembling) applied to the fine-tuning stage for better generalization and stability, our approach demonstrates strong performance across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark (e.g., 72.3/73.8 on MNLI-m/mm and 92.8 on SST-2), significantly outperforming zero-shot prompting methods and achieving even comparable results to strong few-shot approaches using 32 training samples per class 1 .
Cross-lingual Word Embeddings beyond Zero-shot Machine Translation
2020
We explore the transferability of a multilingual neural machine translation model to unseen languages when the transfer is grounded solely on the cross-lingual word embeddings. Our experimental results show that the translation knowledge can transfer weakly to other languages and that the degree of transferability depends on the languages' relatedness. We also discuss the limiting aspects of the multilingual architectures that cause weak translation transfer and suggest how to mitigate the limitations.