Efficient Methods for Natural Language Processing: A Survey

Recent work in natural language processing (NLP) has yielded appealing results from scaling model parameters and training data; however, using only scale to improve performance means that resource consumption also grows. Such resources include data, time, storage, or energy, all of which are naturally limited and unevenly distributed. This motivates research into efficient methods that require fewer resources to achieve similar results. This survey synthesizes and relates current methods and findings in efficient NLP. We aim to provide both guidance for conducting NLP under limited resources, and point towards promising research directions for developing more efficient methods.Comment: Accepted at TACL, pre publication versio

Criteria for effective zero-deforestation commitments

Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, and/or sell. Because each company defines its own zero-deforestation commitment goals and implementation mechanisms, commitment content varies widely. This creates challenges for the assessment of commitment implementation or effectiveness. Here, we develop criteria to assess the potential effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments at reducing deforestation within a company supply chain, regionally, and globally. We apply these criteria to evaluate 52 zero-deforestation commitments made by companies identified by Forest 500 as having high deforestation risk. While our assessment indicates that existing commitments converge with several criteria for effectiveness, they fall short in a few key ways. First, they cover just a small share of the global market for deforestation-risk commodities, which means that their global impact is likely to be small. Second, biome-wide implementation is only achieved in the Brazilian Amazon. Outside this region, implementation occurs mainly through certification programs, which are not adopted by all producers and lack third-party near-real time deforestation monitoring. Additionally, around half of all commitments include zero-net deforestation targets and future implementation deadlines, both of which are design elements that may reduce effectiveness. Zero-net targets allow promises of future reforestation to compensate for current forest loss, while future implementation deadlines allow for preemptive clearing. To increase the likelihood that commitments will lead to reduced deforestation across all scales, more companies should adopt zero-gross deforestation targets with immediate implementation deadlines and clear sanction-based implementation mechanisms in biomes with high risk of forest to commodity conversion.ISSN:0959-3780ISSN:1872-949

Transitioning to more sustainable, low-emissions agriculture in Brazil

KEY FINDINGS Cattle producers joined sustainability initiatives primarily to increase production, reduce production costs, learn new practices and access innovations, and because of their interest in sustainability. Farmers who shifted to sustainable intensification practices increased their productivity. Some also accessed new markets and a minority earned higher prices. Producers sought farming advice mostly from nearby farmers and technicians promoting sustainability initiatives. The cost of changing farm practices, insufficient technical assistance or capacity, and difficulty in complying with legal standards were the major barriers preventing other cattle producers from participating in sustainability initiatives. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per kg of beef of cattle farmers in sustainable intensification programs were 18% lower compared to neighboring farms not in the programs. Early life-cycle cattle ranching (e.g. calving, early rearing), commonly associated with deforestation, has been more engaged with NGO initiatives providing support and agronomic outreach rather than formal standards and reporting. Coffee Coffee farmers joined a certification program because of requests from buyers, potential for receiving price premiums on their coffee, and to access new markets with certified products. Coffee farmers producing certified coffee increased their economic efficiency, mainly due to higher productivity, compared to before they certified. Coffee producers' connections to technicians and access to information mostly revolved around their participation in cooperatives.POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS Build on market development lessons from the coffee sector to enhance sustainability, quality, traceability, and branding in the cattle sector. Expand sustainability initiatives’ capacity to deliver market access, technical assistance, and finance services to more cattle farmers. Continue support to producers in sustainability initiatives over multiple years, as they are likely to increase the sustainability of their practices with time. Expand agronomic outreach and sustainability initiatives to calving and early rearing operations to reduce associated deforestation and GHG emissions

Generation of Large-Scale Vorticity in a Homogeneous Turbulence with a Mean Velocity Shear

An effect of a mean velocity shear on a turbulence and on the effective force which is determined by the gradient of Reynolds stresses is studied. Generation of a mean vorticity in a homogeneous incompressible turbulent flow with an imposed mean velocity shear due to an excitation of a large-scale instability is found. The instability is caused by a combined effect of the large-scale shear motions (''skew-induced" deflection of equilibrium mean vorticity) and ''Reynolds stress-induced" generation of perturbations of mean vorticity. Spatial characteristics, such as the minimum size of the growing perturbations and the size of perturbations with the maximum growth rate, are determined. This instability and the dynamics of the mean vorticity are associated with the Prandtl's turbulent secondary flows. This instability is similar to the mean-field magnetic dynamo instability. Astrophysical applications of the obtained results are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, REVTEX4, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Automatic Generation and Modeling of Customized Discrete Fourier Transform IP Cores

This report presents an equation-based resource utilization model for automatically gener-ated discrete Fourier transform (DFT) soft core IPs. The parameterized DFT IP generator allows a user to make customized tradeoffs between cost and performance and between utilization of different resource classes. The equation-based resource model permits imme-diate and accurate estimation of resource require~nents as the user considers the different generator options ¯ Furthermore, the fast turnaround of the model allows it to be combined with a search algorithm such that the user could query automatically for an optimal design within the stated performance and resource constraints. Following a brief review of the DFT IP generator, this report presents the development of the equation-based models for estimating slice and hard macro utilizations in the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA family. The evaluation section shows that an average error of 6.1 % is achievable by a ~nodel of linear equations that can be evaluated in sub-microseconds. The report fl~rther offers a demonstration of the automatic design exploration capability

Data Flow Oriented Hardware Design of RNS-based Polynomial Multiplication for SHE Acceleration

This paper presents a hardware implementation of a Residue Polynomial Multiplier (RPM), designed to accelerate the full Residue Number System (RNS) variant of the Fan-Vercauteren scheme proposed by Bajard et al. [BEHZ16]. Our design speeds up polynomial multiplication via a Negative Wrapped Convolution (NWC) which locally computes the required RNS channel dependent twiddle factors. Compared to related works, this design is more versatile regarding the addressable parameter sets for the BFV scheme. This is mainly brought by our proposed twiddle factor generator that makes the design BRAM utilization independent of the RNS basis size, with a negligible communication bandwidth usage for non-payload data. Furthermore, the generalization of a DFT hardware generator is explored in order to generate RNS friendly NTT architectures. This approach helps us to validate our RPM design over parameter sets from the work of Halevi et al. [HPS18]. For the depth-20 setting, we achieve an estimated speed up for the residue polynomial multiplications greater than 76 during ciphertexts multiplication, and greater than 16 during relinearization. It thus results in a single-threaded Mult&Relin ciphertext operation in 109.4 ms (×3.19 faster than [HPS18]) with RPM counting for less than 15% of the new computation time. Our RPM design scales up with reasonable use of hardware resources and realistic bandwidth requirements. It can also be exploited for other RNS based implementations of RLWE cryptosystems