Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning , which drastically reduces the number of task-speciﬁc training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model (PaLM). We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly eﬃcient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued beneﬁts of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the ﬁnetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A signiﬁcant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

We show that margin-based bitext mining in a multilingual sentence space can be applied to monolingual corpora of billions of sentences. We are using ten snapshots of a curated common crawl corpus (Wenzek et al., 2019) totalling 32.7 billion unique sentences. Using one unified approach for 38 languages, we were able to mine 4.5 billions parallel sentences, out of which 661 million are aligned with English. 20 language pairs have more then 30 million parallel sentences, 112 more then 10 million, and most more than one million, including direct alignments between many European or Asian languages. 
To evaluate the quality of the mined bitexts, we train NMT systems for most of the language pairs and evaluate them on TED, WMT and WAT test sets. Using our mined bitexts only and no human translated parallel data, we achieve a new state-of-the-art for a single system on the WMT'19 test set for translation between English and German, Russian and Chinese, as well as German/French. In particular, our English/German system outperforms the best single one by close to 4 BLEU points and is almost on pair with best WMT'19 evaluation system which uses system combination and back-translation. We also achieve excellent results for distant languages pairs like Russian/Japanese, outperforming the best submission at the 2019 workshop on Asian Translation (WAT).

CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the WEB

This report provides a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT for machine translation, including translation prompt, multilingual translation, and translation robustness. We adopt the prompts advised by ChatGPT to trigger its translation ability and ﬁnd that the candidate prompts generally work well and show minor performance differences. By evaluating on a number of benchmark test sets 1 , we ﬁnd that ChatGPT performs competitively with commercial translation products (e.g., Google Translate) on high-resource European languages but lags behind signiﬁcantly on low-resource or distant languages. For distant languages, we explore an interesting strategy named pivot prompting that asks ChatGPT to translate the source sentence into a high-resource pivot language before into the target language, which improves the translation performance signiﬁcantly. As for the translation robustness, ChatGPT does not perform as well as the commercial systems on biomedical abstracts or Reddit comments but is potentially a good translator for spoken language.

Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? A Preliminary Study

Large language models (LMs) offer unprecedented language generation capabilities and exciting opportunities for interaction design. However, their highly context-dependent capabilities are difficult to grasp and are often subjectively interpreted. In this paper, we argue that by curating and analyzing large interaction datasets, the HCI community can foster more incisive examinations of LMs’ generative capabilities. Exemplifying this approach, we present CoAuthor, a dataset designed for revealing GPT-3’s capabilities in assisting creative and argumentative writing. CoAuthor captures rich interactions between 63 writers and four instances of GPT-3 across 1445 writing sessions. We demonstrate that CoAuthor can address questions about GPT-3’s language, ideation, and collaboration capabilities, and reveal its contribution as a writing “collaborator” under various definitions of good collaboration. Finally, we discuss how this work may facilitate a more principled discussion around LMs’ promises and pitfalls in relation to interaction design. The dataset and an interface for replaying the writing sessions are publicly available at https://coauthor.stanford.edu.

/pdf/coauthor-designing-a-human-ai-collaborative-writing-dataset-3bglj3e9.pdf

CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities

Existing work in translation demonstrated the potential of massively multilingual machine translation by training a single model able to translate between any pair of languages. However, much of this work is English-Centric by training only on data which was translated from or to English. While this is supported by large sources of training data, it does not reflect translation needs worldwide. In this work, we create a true Many-to-Many multilingual translation model that can translate directly between any pair of 100 languages. We build and open source a training dataset that covers thousands of language directions with supervised data, created through large-scale mining. Then, we explore how to effectively increase model capacity through a combination of dense scaling and language-specific sparse parameters to create high quality models. Our focus on non-English-Centric models brings gains of more than 10 BLEU when directly translating between non-English directions while performing competitively to the best single systems of WMT. We open-source our scripts so that others may reproduce the data, evaluation, and final M2M-100 model.

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

/pdf/beyond-english-centric-multilingual-machine-translation-5bzxqs9xcs.pdf

Document-level machine translation conditions on surrounding sentences to produce coherent translations. There has been much recent work in this area with the introduction of custom model architectures and decoding algorithms. This paper presents a systematic comparison of selected approaches from the literature on two benchmarks for which document-level phenomena evaluation suites exist. We find that a simple method based purely on back-translating monolingual document-level data performs as well as much more elaborate alternatives, both in terms of document-level metrics as well as human evaluation.

Zhiyi Ma

Papers

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

Beyond English-Centric Multilingual Machine Translation

A Comparison of Approaches to Document-level Machine Translation.