Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) is an effective retrieval-augmented language model applied across a variety of open-domain tasks, such as question answering, fact checking, etc. In FiD, supporting passages are first retrieved and then processed using a generative model (Reader), which can cause a significant bottleneck in decoding time, particularly with long outputs. In this work, we analyze the contribution and necessity of all the retrieved passages to the performance of reader models, and propose eliminating some of the retrieved information, at the token level, that might not contribute essential information to the answer generation process. We demonstrate that our method can reduce run-time by up to 62.2%, with only a 2% reduction in performance, and in some cases, even improve the performance results.
Causal transformer language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, typically require some form of positional encoding, such as positional embeddings. However, we show that LMs without any explicit positional encoding are still competitive with standard models and that this phenomenon is robust across different datasets, model sizes, and sequence lengths. Probing experiments reveal that such models acquire an implicit notion of absolute positions throughout the network, effectively compensating for the missing information. We conjecture that causal attention enables the model to infer the number of predecessors that each token can attend to, thereby approximating its absolute position. Our findings indicate that causal LMs might derive positional awareness not only from the explicit positioning mechanism but also from the effects of the causal mask.
While large language models a la BERT are used ubiquitously in NLP, pretraining them is considered a luxury that only a few well-funded industry labs can afford. How can one train such models with a more modest budget? We present a recipe for pretraining a masked language model in 24 hours using a single low-end deep learning server. We demonstrate that through a combination of software optimizations, design choices, and hyperparameter tuning, it is possible to produce models that are competitive with BERT-base on GLUE tasks at a fraction of the original pretraining cost.
In recent years, large pre-trained models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in many of NLP tasks. However, the deployment of these models on devices with limited resources is challenging due to the models’ large computational consumption and memory requirements. Moreover, the need for a considerable amount of labeled training data also hinders real-world deployment scenarios. Model distillation has shown promising results for reducing model size, computational load and data efficiency. In this paper we test the boundaries of BERT model distillation in terms of model compression, inference efficiency and data scarcity. We show that classification tasks that require the capturing of general lexical semantics can be successfully distilled by very simple and efficient models and require relatively small amount of labeled training data. We also show that the distillation of large pre-trained models is more effective in real-life scenarios where limited amounts of labeled training are available.
We present SetExpander, a corpus-based system for expanding a seed set of terms into a more complete set of terms that belong to the same semantic class. SetExpander implements an iterative end-to-end workflow. It enables users to easily select a seed set of terms, expand it, view the expanded set, validate it, re-expand the validated set and store it, thus simplifying the extraction of domain-specific fine-grained semantic classes. SetExpander has been used successfully in real-life use cases including integration into an automated recruitment system and an issues and defects resolution system.