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Kevin Gimpel

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10 papers

2 author rows

TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Aarohi Srivastava
Abhinav Rastogi
Abhishek Rao
Abu Awal Md Shoeb
Abubakar Abid
Adam Fisch
Adam R. Brown
Adam Santoro

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG- bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood develop- ment, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google- internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Chess as a Testbed for Language Model State Tracking

Shubham Toshniwal
Sam Wiseman
Karen Livescu
Kevin Gimpel

Transformer language models have made tremendous strides in natural language understanding tasks. However, the complexity of natural language makes it challenging to ascertain how accurately these models are tracking the world state underlying the text. Motivated by this issue, we consider the task of language modeling for the game of chess. Unlike natural language, chess notations describe a simple, constrained, and deterministic domain. Moreover, we observe that the appropriate choice of chess notation allows for directly probing the world state, without requiring any additional probing-related machinery. We find that: (a) With enough training data, transformer language models can learn to track pieces and predict legal moves with high accuracy when trained solely on move sequences. (b) For small training sets providing access to board state information during training can yield significant improvements. (c) The success of transformer language models is dependent on access to the entire game history i. e. “full attention”. Approximating this full attention results in a significant performance drop. We propose this testbed as a benchmark for future work on the development and analysis of transformer language models.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Deep Clustering of Text Representations for Supervision-Free Probing of Syntax

Vikram Gupta
Haoyue Shi
Kevin Gimpel
Mrinmaya Sachan

We explore deep clustering of text representations for unsupervised model interpretation and induction of syntax. As these representations are high-dimensional, out-of-the-box methods like KMeans do not work well. Thus, our approach jointly transforms the representations into a lowerdimensional cluster-friendly space and clusters them. We consider two notions of syntax: part of speech induction (POSI) and constituency labelling (CoLab) in this work. Interestingly, we find that Multilingual BERT (mBERT) contains surprising amount of syntactic knowledge of English; possibly even as much as English BERT (E-BERT). Our model can be used as a supervision-free probe which is arguably a less-biased way of probing. We find that unsupervised probes show benefits from higher layers as compared to supervised probes. We further note that our unsupervised probe utilizes E-BERT and mBERT representations differently, especially for POSI. We validate the efficacy of our probe by demonstrating its capabilities as a unsupervised syntax induction technique. Our probe works well for both syntactic formalisms by simply adapting the input representations. We report competitive performance of our probe on 45-tag English POSI, state-of-the-art performance on 12tag POSI across 10 languages, and competitive results on CoLab. We also perform zero-shot syntax induction on resource impoverished languages and report strong results.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Moment Distributionally Robust Tree Structured Prediction

Yeshu Li
Danyal Saeed
Xinhua Zhang
Brian Ziebart
Kevin Gimpel

Structured prediction of tree-shaped objects is heavily studied under the name of syntactic dependency parsing. Current practice based on maximum likelihood or margin is either agnostic to or inconsistent with the evaluation loss. Risk minimization alleviates the discrepancy between training and test objectives but typically induces a non-convex problem. These approaches adopt explicit regularization to combat overfitting without probabilistic interpretation. We propose a moment-based distributionally robust optimization approach for tree structured prediction, where the worst-case expected loss over a set of distributions within bounded moment divergence from the empirical distribution is minimized. We develop efficient algorithms for arborescences and other variants of trees. We derive Fisher consistency, convergence rates and generalization bounds for our proposed method. We evaluate its empirical effectiveness on dependency parsing benchmarks.

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ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations

Zhenzhong Lan
Mingda Chen
Sebastian Goodman
Kevin Gimpel
Piyush Sharma
Radu Soricut

Increasing model size when pretraining natural language representations often results in improved performance on downstream tasks. However, at some point further model increases become harder due to GPU/TPU memory limitations and longer training times. To address these problems, we present two parameter-reduction techniques to lower memory consumption and increase the training speed of BERT~\citep{devlin2018bert}. Comprehensive empirical evidence shows that our proposed methods lead to models that scale much better compared to the original BERT. We also use a self-supervised loss that focuses on modeling inter-sentence coherence, and show it consistently helps downstream tasks with multi-sentence inputs. As a result, our best model establishes new state-of-the-art results on the GLUE, RACE, and \squad benchmarks while having fewer parameters compared to BERT-large. The code and the pretrained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/ALBERT.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions

Zewei Chu
Mingda Chen
Jing Chen
Miaosen Wang
Kevin Gimpel
Manaal Faruqui
Xiance Si

We present a large-scale dataset for the task of rewriting an ill-formed natural language question to a well-formed one. Our multi-domain question rewriting (MQR) dataset is constructed from human contributed Stack Exchange question edit histories. The dataset contains 427, 719 question pairs which come from 303 domains. We provide human annotations for a subset of the dataset as a quality estimate. When moving from ill-formed to well-formed questions, the question quality improves by an average of 45 points across three aspects. We train sequence-to-sequence neural models on the constructed dataset and obtain an improvement of 13. 2% in BLEU-4 over baseline methods built from other data resources. We release the MQR dataset to encourage research on the problem of question rewriting. 1

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noise

Dan Hendrycks
Mantas Mazeika
Duncan Wilson
Kevin Gimpel

The growing importance of massive datasets with the advent of deep learning makes robustness to label noise a critical property for classifiers to have. Sources of label noise include automatic labeling for large datasets, non-expert labeling, and label corruption by data poisoning adversaries. In the latter case, corruptions may be arbitrarily bad, even so bad that a classifier predicts the wrong labels with high confidence. To protect against such sources of noise, we leverage the fact that a small set of clean labels is often easy to procure. We demonstrate that robustness to label noise up to severe strengths can be achieved by using a set of trusted data with clean labels, and propose a loss correction that utilizes trusted examples in a data-efficient manner to mitigate the effects of label noise on deep neural network classifiers. Across vision and natural language processing tasks, we experiment with various label noises at several strengths, and show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Constraints Based Convex Belief Propagation

Yaniv Tenzer
Alex Schwing
Kevin Gimpel
Tamir Hazan

Inference in Markov random fields subject to consistency structure is a fundamental problem that arises in many real-life applications. In order to enforce consistency, classical approaches utilize consistency potentials or encode constraints over feasible instances. Unfortunately this comes at the price of a serious computational bottleneck. In this paper we suggest to tackle consistency by incorporating constraints on beliefs. This permits derivation of a closed-form message-passing algorithm which we refer to as the Constraints Based Convex Belief Propagation (CBCBP). Experiments show that CBCBP outperforms the standard approach while being at least an order of magnitude faster.

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ICLR Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Towards Universal Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings

John Wieting
Mohit Bansal
Kevin Gimpel
Karen Livescu

We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence embeddings based on supervision from the Paraphrase Database (Ganitkevitch et al., 2013). We compare six compositional architectures, evaluating them on annotated textual similarity datasets drawn both from the same distribution as the training data and from a wide range of other domains. We find that the most complex architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks, perform best on the in-domain data. However, in out-of-domain scenarios, simple architectures such as word averaging vastly outperform LSTMs. Our simplest averaging model is even competitive with systems tuned for the particular tasks while also being extremely efficient and easy to use. In order to better understand how these architectures compare, we conduct further experiments on three supervised NLP tasks: sentence similarity, entailment, and sentiment classification. We again find that the word averaging models perform well for sentence similarity and entailment, outperforming LSTMs. However, on sentiment classification, we find that the LSTM performs very strongly-even recording new state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. We then demonstrate how to combine our pretrained sentence embeddings with these supervised tasks, using them both as a prior and as a black box feature extractor. This leads to performance rivaling the state of the art on the SICK similarity and entailment tasks. We release all of our resources to the research community with the hope that they can serve as the new baseline for further work on universal sentence embeddings.

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NeurIPS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Logistic Normal Priors for Unsupervised Probabilistic Grammar Induction

Shay Cohen
Kevin Gimpel
Noah Smith

We explore a new Bayesian model for probabilistic grammars, a family of distributions over discrete structures that includes hidden Markov models and probabilistic context-free grammars. Our model extends the correlated topic model framework to probabilistic grammars, exploiting the logistic normal distribution as a prior over the grammar parameters. We derive a variational EM algorithm for that model, and then experiment with the task of unsupervised grammar induction for natural language dependency parsing. We show that our model achieves superior results over previous models that use different priors.

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