Asynchronous and Segmented Bidirectional Encoding for NMT

With the rapid advancement of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), enhancing translation efficiency and quality has become a focal point of research. Despite the commendable performance of general models such as the Transformer in various aspects, they still fall short in processing long sentences and fully leveraging bidirectional contextual information. This paper introduces an improved model based on the Transformer, implementing an asynchronous and segmented bidirectional decoding strategy aimed at elevating translation efficiency and accuracy. Compared to traditional unidirectional translations from left-to-right or right-to-left, our method demonstrates heightened efficiency and improved translation quality, particularly in handling long sentences. Experimental results on the IWSLT2017 dataset confirm the effectiveness of our approach in accelerating translation and increasing accuracy, especially surpassing traditional unidirectional strategies in long sentence translation. Furthermore, this study analyzes the impact of sentence length on decoding outcomes and explores the model's performance in various scenarios. The findings of this research not only provide an effective encoding strategy for the NMT field but also pave new avenues and directions for future studies

Generalized Activation via Multivariate Projection

Activation functions are essential to introduce nonlinearity into neural networks, with the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) often favored for its simplicity and effectiveness. Motivated by the structural similarity between a shallow Feedforward Neural Network (FNN) and a single iteration of the Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) algorithm, a standard approach for solving constrained optimization problems, we consider ReLU as a projection from R onto the nonnegative half-line R+. Building on this interpretation, we extend ReLU by substituting it with a generalized projection operator onto a convex cone, such as the Second-Order Cone (SOC) projection, thereby naturally extending it to a Multivariate Projection Unit (MPU), an activation function with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. We further provide mathematical proof establishing that FNNs activated by SOC projections outperform those utilizing ReLU in terms of expressive power. Experimental evaluations on widely-adopted architectures further corroborate MPU's effectiveness against a broader range of existing activation functions

DTPP: Differentiable Joint Conditional Prediction and Cost Evaluation for Tree Policy Planning in Autonomous Driving

Motion prediction and cost evaluation are vital components in the decision-making system of autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods often ignore the importance of cost learning and treat them as separate modules. In this study, we employ a tree-structured policy planner and propose a differentiable joint training framework for both ego-conditioned prediction and cost models, resulting in a direct improvement of the final planning performance. For conditional prediction, we introduce a query-centric Transformer model that performs efficient ego-conditioned motion prediction. For planning cost, we propose a learnable context-aware cost function with latent interaction features, facilitating differentiable joint learning. We validate our proposed approach using the real-world nuPlan dataset and its associated planning test platform. Our framework not only matches state-of-the-art planning methods but outperforms other learning-based methods in planning quality, while operating more efficiently in terms of runtime. We show that joint training delivers significantly better performance than separate training of the two modules. Additionally, we find that tree-structured policy planning outperforms the conventional single-stage planning approach

Does Negative Sampling Matter? A Review with Insights into its Theory and Applications

Negative sampling has swiftly risen to prominence as a focal point of research, with wide-ranging applications spanning machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and recommender systems. This growing interest raises several critical questions: Does negative sampling really matter? Is there a general framework that can incorporate all existing negative sampling methods? In what fields is it applied? Addressing these questions, we propose a general framework that leverages negative sampling. Delving into the history of negative sampling, we trace the development of negative sampling through five evolutionary paths. We dissect and categorize the strategies used to select negative sample candidates, detailing global, local, mini-batch, hop, and memory-based approaches. Our review categorizes current negative sampling methods into five types: static, hard, GAN-based, Auxiliary-based, and In-batch methods, providing a clear structure for understanding negative sampling. Beyond detailed categorization, we highlight the application of negative sampling in various areas, offering insights into its practical benefits. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for negative sampling.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figure

BatchSampler: Sampling Mini-Batches for Contrastive Learning in Vision, Language, and Graphs

In-Batch contrastive learning is a state-of-the-art self-supervised method that brings semantically-similar instances close while pushing dissimilar instances apart within a mini-batch. Its key to success is the negative sharing strategy, in which every instance serves as a negative for the others within the mini-batch. Recent studies aim to improve performance by sampling hard negatives \textit{within the current mini-batch}, whose quality is bounded by the mini-batch itself. In this work, we propose to improve contrastive learning by sampling mini-batches from the input data. We present BatchSampler\footnote{The code is available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/BatchSampler}} to sample mini-batches of hard-to-distinguish (i.e., hard and true negatives to each other) instances. To make each mini-batch have fewer false negatives, we design the proximity graph of randomly-selected instances. To form the mini-batch, we leverage random walk with restart on the proximity graph to help sample hard-to-distinguish instances. BatchSampler is a simple and general technique that can be directly plugged into existing contrastive learning models in vision, language, and graphs. Extensive experiments on datasets of three modalities show that BatchSampler can consistently improve the performance of powerful contrastive models, as shown by significant improvements of SimCLR on ImageNet-100, SimCSE on STS (language), and GraphCL and MVGRL on graph datasets.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figure

CritiqueLLM: Scaling LLM-as-Critic for Effective and Explainable Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation

Since the natural language processing (NLP) community started to make large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, act as a critic to evaluate the quality of generated texts, most of them only train a critique generation model of a specific scale on specific datasets. We argue that a comprehensive investigation on the key factor of LLM-based evaluation models, such as scaling properties, is lacking, so that it is still inconclusive whether these models have potential to replace GPT-4's evaluation in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new critique generation model called CritiqueLLM, which includes a dialogue-based prompting method for high-quality referenced / reference-free evaluation data. Experimental results show that our model can achieve comparable evaluation performance to GPT-4 especially in system-level correlations, and even outperform GPT-4 in 3 out of 8 tasks in a challenging reference-free setting. We conduct detailed analysis to show promising scaling properties of our model in the quality of generated critiques. We also demonstrate that our generated critiques can act as scalable feedback to directly improve the generation quality of LLMs.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

CharacterGLM: Customizing Chinese Conversational AI Characters with Large Language Models

In this paper, we present CharacterGLM, a series of models built upon ChatGLM, with model sizes ranging from 6B to 66B parameters. Our CharacterGLM is designed for generating Character-based Dialogues (CharacterDial), which aims to equip a conversational AI system with character customization for satisfying people's inherent social desires and emotional needs. On top of CharacterGLM, we can customize various AI characters or social agents by configuring their attributes (identities, interests, viewpoints, experiences, achievements, social relationships, etc.) and behaviors (linguistic features, emotional expressions, interaction patterns, etc.). Our model outperforms most mainstream close-source large langauge models, including the GPT series, especially in terms of consistency, human-likeness, and engagement according to manual evaluations. We will release our 6B version of CharacterGLM and a subset of training data to facilitate further research development in the direction of character-based dialogue generation.Comment: Work in progres