Understanding the Mechanics of SPIGOT: Surrogate Gradients for Latent Structure Learning

Latent structure models are a powerful tool for modeling language data: they can mitigate the error propagation and annotation bottleneck in pipeline systems, while simultaneously uncovering linguistic insights about the data. One challenge with end-to-end training of these models is the argmax operation, which has null gradient. In this paper, we focus on surrogate gradients, a popular strategy to deal with this problem. We explore latent structure learning through the angle of pulling back the downstream learning objective. In this paradigm, we discover a principled motivation for both the straight-through estimator (STE) as well as the recently-proposed SPIGOT - a variant of STE for structured models. Our perspective leads to new algorithms in the same family. We empirically compare the known and the novel pulled-back estimators against the popular alternatives, yielding new insight for practitioners and revealing intriguing failure cases.Comment: EMNLP 202

Adversarial Generation of Natural Language

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gathered a lot of attention from the computer vision community, yielding impressive results for image generation. Advances in the adversarial generation of natural language from noise however are not commensurate with the progress made in generating images, and still lag far behind likelihood based methods. In this paper, we take a step towards generating natural language with a GAN objective alone. We introduce a simple baseline that addresses the discrete output space problem without relying on gradient estimators and show that it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on a Chinese poem generation dataset. We present quantitative results on generating sentences from context-free and probabilistic context-free grammars, and qualitative language modeling results. A conditional version is also described that can generate sequences conditioned on sentence characteristics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

On the Interpretability of Attention Networks

Attention mechanisms form a core component of several successful deep learning architectures, and are based on one key idea: ''The output depends only on a small (but unknown) segment of the input.'' In several practical applications like image captioning and language translation, this is mostly true. In trained models with an attention mechanism, the outputs of an intermediate module that encodes the segment of input responsible for the output is often used as a way to peek into the `reasoning` of the network. We make such a notion more precise for a variant of the classification problem that we term selective dependence classification (SDC) when used with attention model architectures. Under such a setting, we demonstrate various error modes where an attention model can be accurate but fail to be interpretable, and show that such models do occur as a result of training. We illustrate various situations that can accentuate and mitigate this behaviour. Finally, we use our objective definition of interpretability for SDC tasks to evaluate a few attention model learning algorithms designed to encourage sparsity and demonstrate that these algorithms help improve interpretability.Comment: ACML 2022, proceedings to be appeared in PMLR, Volume 18

Modeling the Multi-mode Distribution in Self-Supervised Language Models

Self-supervised large language models (LMs) have become a highly-influential and foundational tool for many NLP models. For this reason, their expressivity is an important topic of study. In near-universal practice, given the language context, the model predicts a word from the vocabulary using a single embedded vector representation of both context and dictionary entries. Note that the context sometimes implies that the distribution over predicted words should be multi-modal in embedded space. However, the context’s single-vector representation provably fails to capture such a distribution. To address this limitation, we propose to represent context with multiple vector embeddings, which we term facets. This is distinct from previous work on multi-sense vocabulary embeddings, which employs multiple vectors for the dictionary entries, not the context. In this dissertation, we first present the theoretical limitations of the single context embedding in LMs and how the theoretical analyses suggest new alternative softmax layers that encode a context as multiple embeddings. The proposed alternatives achieve better perplexity than the mixture of softmax (MoS), especially given an ambiguous context, without adding significant computational cost to LMs. Our approaches also let GPT-2 learn to properly copy the entities from the context, which increases the coherence of the generated text without requiring any labels. In addition to predicting the next word, we also use multiple CLS embeddings to improve state-of-the-art pretraining methods for BERT on natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks without introducing significant extra parameters or computations, especially when the training datasets are small. Furthermore, we show that our multi-facet embeddings improve the sequential recommendation, scientific paper embeddings, measurement of sentence similarity, distantly supervised relation extraction, unsupervised text pattern entailment detection, and cold-start citation recommendation. Finally, we use the multiple vector embeddings to predict the future topics of a context, and build on the basis, we propose a novel interactive language generation framework