KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks.

Challenging problems such as open-domain question answering, fact checking, slot filling and entity linking require access to large, external knowledge sources. While some models do well on individual tasks, developing general models is difficult as each task might require computationally expensive indexing of custom knowledge sources, in addition to dedicated infrastructure. To catalyze research on models that condition on specific information in large textual resources, we present a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT). All tasks in KILT are grounded in the same snapshot of Wikipedia, reducing engineering turnaround through the re-use of components, as well as accelerating research into task-agnostic memory architectures. We test both task-specific and general baselines, evaluating downstream performance in addition to the ability of the models to provide provenance. We find that a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model is a strong baseline, outperforming more tailor-made approaches for fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialogue, and yielding competitive results on entity linking and slot filling, by generating disambiguated text. KILT data and code are available at https://github.com/facebookresearc

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Controllable Text Generation for All Ages: Evaluating a Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adapted Dialogue

To be trusted and perceived as natural and coherent, conversational systems must adapt to the language of their users. While personalized dialogue is a promising direction, controlling generation for fine-grained language features remains a challenge in this approach. A recent line of research showed the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained language models toward adapting to a text’s topic or sentiment. In this study, we build on these approaches and focus on a higher-level dimension of language variation: speakers’ age. We frame the task as a dialogue response generation, and test methods based on bag-of-words (BoW) and neural discriminators (Disc) to condition the output of GPT-2 and DialoGPT without altering the parameters of the language models. We show that Disc models achieve a higher degree of detectable control than BoW models based on automatic evaluation. In contrast, humans can partially detect age differences in BoW but not Disc responses. Since BoW responses are deemed better than Disc ones by humans, simple controllable methods thus appear to be a better tradeoff between adaptation and language quality. Our work confirms the challenges of adapting to higher-level dimensions of language variation. Moreover, it highlights the need to evaluate natural language generation thoroughly

Controllable Text Generation for All Ages: Evaluating a Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adapted Dialogue

To be trusted and perceived as natural and coherent, conversational systems must adapt to the language of their users. While personalized dialogue is a promising direction, controlling generation for fine-grained language features remains a challenge in this approach. A recent line of research showed the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained language models toward adapting to a text’s topic or sentiment. In this study, we build on these approaches and focus on a higher-level dimension of language variation: speakers’ age. We frame the task as a dialogue response generation, and test methods based on bag-of-words (BoW) and neural discriminators (Disc) to condition the output of GPT-2 and DialoGPT without altering the parameters of the language models. We show that Disc models achieve a higher degree of detectable control than BoW models based on automatic evaluation. In contrast, humans can partially detect age differences in BoW but not Disc responses. Since BoW responses are deemed better than Disc ones by humans, simple controllable methods thus appear to be a better tradeoff between adaptation and language quality. Our work confirms the challenges of adapting to higher-level dimensions of language variation. Moreover, it highlights the need to evaluate natural language generation thoroughly

Nonlinear spike-and-slab sparse coding for interpretable image encoding

Sparse coding is a popular approach to model natural images but has faced two main challenges: modelling low-level image components (such as edge-like structures and their occlusions) and modelling varying pixel intensities. Traditionally, images are modelled as a sparse linear superposition of dictionary elements, where the probabilistic view of this problem is that the coefficients follow a Laplace or Cauchy prior distribution. We propose a novel model that instead uses a spike-and-slab prior and nonlinear combination of components. With the prior, our model can easily represent exact zeros for e.g. the absence of an image component, such as an edge, and a distribution over non-zero pixel intensities. With the nonlinearity (the nonlinear max combination rule), the idea is to target occlusions; dictionary elements correspond to image components that can occlude each other. There are major consequences of the model assumptions made by both (non)linear approaches, thus the main goal of this paper is to isolate and highlight differences between them. Parameter optimization is analytically and computationally intractable in our model, thus as a main contribution we design an exact Gibbs sampler for efficient inference which we can apply to higher dimensional data using latent variable preselection. Results on natural and artificial occlusion-rich data with controlled forms of sparse structure show that our model can extract a sparse set of edge-like components that closely match the generating process, which we refer to as interpretable components. Furthermore, the sparseness of the solution closely follows the ground-truth number of components/edges in the images. The linear model did not learn such edge-like components with any level of sparsity. This suggests that our model can adaptively well-approximate and characterize the meaningful generation process