No Arabic abstract
The research community has proposed copious modifications to the Transformer architecture since it was introduced over three years ago, relatively few of which have seen widespread adoption. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate many of these modifications in a shared experimental setting that covers most of the common uses of the Transformer in natural language processing. Surprisingly, we find that most modifications do not meaningfully improve performance. Furthermore, most of the Transformer variants we found beneficial were either developed in the same codebase that we used or are relatively minor changes. We conjecture that performance improvements may strongly depend on implementation details and correspondingly make some recommendations for improving the generality of experimental results.
The development of the A64FX processor by Fujitsu has created a massive innovation in High-Performance Computing and the birth of Fugaku: the current worlds fastest supercomputer. A variety of tools are used to analyze the run-times and performances of several applications, and in particular, how these applications scale on the A64FX processor. We examine the performance and behavior of applications through OpenMP scaling and how their performance differs across different compilers on the new Ookami cluster at Stony Brook University as well as the Fugaku supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan.
Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.
Representing entities and relations in an embedding space is a well-studied approach for machine learning on relational data. Existing approaches, however, primarily focus on improving accuracy and overlook other aspects such as robustness and interpretability. In this paper, we propose adversarial modifications for link prediction models: identifying the fact to add into or remove from the knowledge graph that changes the prediction for a target fact after the model is retrained. Using these single modifications of the graph, we identify the most influential fact for a predicted link and evaluate the sensitivity of the model to the addition of fake facts. We introduce an efficient approach to estimate the effect of such modifications by approximating the change in the embeddings when the knowledge graph changes. To avoid the combinatorial search over all possible facts, we train a network to decode embeddings to their corresponding graph components, allowing the use of gradient-based optimization to identify the adversarial modification. We use these techniques to evaluate the robustness of link prediction models (by measuring sensitivity to additional facts), study interpretability through the facts most responsible for predictions (by identifying the most influential neighbors), and detect incorrect facts in the knowledge base.
Recurrent Neural Networks have long been the dominating choice for sequence modeling. However, it severely suffers from two issues: impotent in capturing very long-term dependencies and unable to parallelize the sequential computation procedure. Therefore, many non-recurrent sequence models that are built on convolution and attention operations have been proposed recently. Notably, models with multi-head attention such as Transformer have demonstrated extreme effectiveness in capturing long-term dependencies in a variety of sequence modeling tasks. Despite their success, however, these models lack necessary components to model local structures in sequences and heavily rely on position embeddings that have limited effects and require a considerable amount of design efforts. In this paper, we propose the R-Transformer which enjoys the advantages of both RNNs and the multi-head attention mechanism while avoids their respective drawbacks. The proposed model can effectively capture both local structures and global long-term dependencies in sequences without any use of position embeddings. We evaluate R-Transformer through extensive experiments with data from a wide range of domains and the empirical results show that R-Transformer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in most of the tasks. We have made the code publicly available at url{https://github.com/DSE-MSU/R-transformer}.
We study the robustness of image classifiers to temporal perturbations derived from videos. As part of this study, we construct two datasets, ImageNet-Vid-Robust and YTBB-Robust , containing a total 57,897 images grouped into 3,139 sets of perceptually similar images. Our datasets were derived from ImageNet-Vid and Youtube-BB respectively and thoroughly re-annotated by human experts for image similarity. We evaluate a diverse array of classifiers pre-trained on ImageNet and show a median classification accuracy drop of 16 and 10 on our two datasets. Additionally, we evaluate three detection models and show that natural perturbations induce both classification as well as localization errors, leading to a median drop in detection mAP of 14 points. Our analysis demonstrates that perturbations occurring naturally in videos pose a substantial and realistic challenge to deploying convolutional neural networks in environments that require both reliable and low-latency predictions