mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer
01 Jun 2021-pp 483-498
TL;DR: This paper proposed a multilingual variant of T5, mT5, which was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages and achieved state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks.
Abstract: The recent “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We detail the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. We also describe a simple technique to prevent “accidental translation” in the zero-shot setting, where a generative model chooses to (partially) translate its prediction into the wrong language. All of the code and model checkpoints used in this work are publicly available.
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TL;DR: A 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which is called PaLM achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark.
Abstract: 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.
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TL;DR: BLOOM as discussed by the authors 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).
Abstract: 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.
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TL;DR: GPT-NeoX-20B is introduced, a 20 billion parameter autoregressive language model trained on the Pile, whose weights will be made freely and openly available to the public through a permissive license.
Abstract: We introduce GPT-NeoX-20B, a 20 billion parameter autoregressive language model trained on the Pile, whose weights will be made freely and openly available to the public through a permissive license. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dense autoregressive model that has publicly available weights at the time of submission. In this work, we describe GPT-NeoX-20B’s architecture and training, and evaluate its performance. We open-source the training and evaluation code, as well as the model weights, at https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox.
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TL;DR: Recently, a large language model (LLM) as mentioned in this paper has been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks.
Abstract: Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.
149 citations
14 Sep 2022
TL;DR: PaLI achieves state-of-the-art in multiple vision and language tasks, while retaining a simple, modular, and scalable design.
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133 citations
References
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13 Sep 2018
TL;DR: This work constructs an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus to 14 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu and finds that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.
Abstract: State-of-the-art natural language processing systems rely on supervision in the form of annotated data to learn competent models. These models are generally trained on data in a single language (usually English), and cannot be directly used beyond that language. Since collecting data in every language is not realistic, there has been a growing interest in cross-lingual language understanding (XLU) and low-resource cross-language transfer. In this work, we construct an evaluation set for XLU by extending the development and test sets of the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Corpus (MultiNLI) to 14 languages, including low-resource languages such as Swahili and Urdu. We hope that our dataset, dubbed XNLI, will catalyze research in cross-lingual sentence understanding by providing an informative standard evaluation task. In addition, we provide several baselines for multilingual sentence understanding, including two based on machine translation systems, and two that use parallel data to train aligned multilingual bag-of-words and LSTM encoders. We find that XNLI represents a practical and challenging evaluation suite, and that directly translating the test data yields the best performance among available baselines.
687 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers background or methods in this paper
...To validate the performance of mT5, we evaluate our models on 6 tasks from the XTREME multilingual benchmark (Hu et al., 2020): the XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) entailment task covering 14 languages; the XQuAD (Artetxe et al., 2020), MLQA (Lewis et al., 2019), and TyDi QA (Clark et al., 2020)…...
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..., 2020): the XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) entailment task covering 14 languages; the XQuAD (Artetxe et al....
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...Following XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2018), we increase the vocabulary size to 250,000 wordpieces....
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: Presented on August 28, 2018 at 12:15 p.m. in the Pettit Microelectronics Research Center, Room 102 A/B.
Abstract: Presented on August 28, 2018 at 12:15 p.m. in the Pettit Microelectronics Research Center, Room 102 A/B.
583 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers background in this paper
...Similar unifying frameworks were proposed by Keskar et al. (2019) and McCann et al. (2018)....
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01 Jul 2020
TL;DR: This work designs an alternative approach that transfers a monolingual model to new languages at the lexical level and shows that it is competitive with multilingual BERT on standard cross-lingUAL classification benchmarks and on a new Cross-lingual Question Answering Dataset (XQuAD).
Abstract: State-of-the-art unsupervised multilingual models (e.g., multilingual BERT) have been shown to generalize in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting. This generalization ability has been attributed to the use of a shared subword vocabulary and joint training across multiple languages giving rise to deep multilingual abstractions. We evaluate this hypothesis by designing an alternative approach that transfers a monolingual model to new languages at the lexical level. More concretely, we first train a transformer-based masked language model on one language, and transfer it to a new language by learning a new embedding matrix with the same masked language modeling objective, freezing parameters of all other layers. This approach does not rely on a shared vocabulary or joint training. However, we show that it is competitive with multilingual BERT on standard cross-lingual classification benchmarks and on a new Cross-lingual Question Answering Dataset (XQuAD). Our results contradict common beliefs of the basis of the generalization ability of multilingual models and suggest that deep monolingual models learn some abstractions that generalize across languages. We also release XQuAD as a more comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark, which comprises 240 paragraphs and 1190 question-answer pairs from SQuAD v1.1 translated into ten languages by professional translators.
556 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers background or methods in this paper
..., 2018) entailment task covering 14 languages; the XQuAD (Artetxe et al., 2020), MLQA (Lewis et al....
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...…6 tasks from the XTREME multilingual benchmark (Hu et al., 2020): the XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) entailment task covering 14 languages; the XQuAD (Artetxe et al., 2020), MLQA (Lewis et al., 2019), and TyDi QA (Clark et al., 2020) reading comprehension benchmarks with 10, 6Standard deviations of…...
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02 May 2020
TL;DR: This work uses the latest advances in language modeling to build a single pre-trained QA model, UNIFIEDQA, that performs well across 19 QA datasets spanning 4 diverse formats, and results in a new state of the art on 10 factoid and commonsense question answering datasets.
Abstract: Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats, such as extractive span selection, multiple choice, etc. This has led to format-specialized models, and even to an implicit division in the QA community. We argue that such boundaries are artificial and perhaps unnecessary, given the reasoning abilities we seek to teach are not governed by the format. As evidence, we use the latest advances in language modeling to build a single pre-trained QA model, UNIFIEDQA, that performs well across 19 QA datasets spanning 4 diverse formats. UNIFIEDQA performs on par with 8 different models that were trained on individual datasets themselves. Even when faced with 12 unseen datasets of observed formats, UNIFIEDQA performs surprisingly well, showing strong generalization from its outof-format training data. Finally, simply finetuning this pre trained QA model into specialized models results in a new state of the art on 10 factoid and commonsense question answering datasets, establishing UNIFIEDQA as a strong starting point for building QA systems.
461 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers methods in this paper
...…for the “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) model released by Raffel et al. (2020) have been used to achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks (Khashabi et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2020; Kale, 2020; Izacard and Grave, 2020; Nogueira et al., 2020; Narang et al., 2020, etc.)....
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: Interestingly, it is observed that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages, evidence that sequence-to-sequence models offers a flexible framework to efficiently aggregate and combine evidence from multiple passages.
Abstract: Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that generative models are good at aggregating and combining evidence from multiple passages.
435 citations