Daily Papers

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are a core component of voice assistants (VA), such as Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline designed to extend SLU systems to new languages, utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) that we fine-tune for machine translation of slot-annotated SLU training data. Our approach improved on the MultiATIS++ benchmark, a primary multi-language SLU dataset, in the cloud scenario using an mBERT model. Specifically, we saw an improvement in the Overall Accuracy metric: from 53% to 62.18%, compared to the existing state-of-the-art method, Fine and Coarse-grained Multi-Task Learning Framework (FC-MTLF). In the on-device scenario (tiny and not pretrained SLU), our method improved the Overall Accuracy from 5.31% to 22.06% over the baseline Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework (GL-CLeF) method. Contrary to both FC-MTLF and GL-CLeF, our LLM-based machine translation does not require changes in the production architecture of SLU. Additionally, our pipeline is slot-type independent: it does not require any slot definitions or examples.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a task that enables machines to understand human language. Some tasks, such as stance detection and sentiment analysis, are closely related to individual subjective perspectives, thus termed individual-level NLU. Previously, these tasks are often simplified to text-level NLU tasks, ignoring individual factors. This not only makes inference difficult and unexplainable but often results in a large number of label errors when creating datasets. To address the above limitations, we propose a new NLU annotation guideline based on individual-level factors. Specifically, we incorporate other posts by the same individual and then annotate individual subjective perspectives after considering all individual posts. We use this guideline to expand and re-annotate the stance detection and topic-based sentiment analysis datasets. We find that error rates in the samples were as high as 31.7\% and 23.3\%. We further use large language models to conduct experiments on the re-annotation datasets and find that the large language models perform well on both datasets after adding individual factors. Both GPT-4o and Llama3-70B can achieve an accuracy greater than 87\% on the re-annotation datasets. We also verify the effectiveness of individual factors through ablation studies. We call on future researchers to add individual factors when creating such datasets. Our re-annotation dataset can be found at https://github.com/24yearsoldstudent/Individual-NLU

Natural language understanding (NLU) is integral to various social media applications. However, existing NLU models rely heavily on context for semantic learning, resulting in compromised performance when faced with short and noisy social media content. To address this issue, we leverage in-context learning (ICL), wherein language models learn to make inferences by conditioning on a handful of demonstrations to enrich the context and propose a novel hashtag-driven in-context learning (HICL) framework. Concretely, we pre-train a model #Encoder, which employs #hashtags (user-annotated topic labels) to drive BERT-based pre-training through contrastive learning. Our objective here is to enable #Encoder to gain the ability to incorporate topic-related semantic information, which allows it to retrieve topic-related posts to enrich contexts and enhance social media NLU with noisy contexts. To further integrate the retrieved context with the source text, we employ a gradient-based method to identify trigger terms useful in fusing information from both sources. For empirical studies, we collected 45M tweets to set up an in-context NLU benchmark, and the experimental results on seven downstream tasks show that HICL substantially advances the previous state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we conducted extensive analyzes and found that: (1) combining source input with a top-retrieved post from #Encoder is more effective than using semantically similar posts; (2) trigger words can largely benefit in merging context from the source and retrieved posts.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In particular, there are not nearly as many SLU task benchmarks, and many of the existing ones use data that is not freely available to all researchers. Recent work has begun to introduce such benchmark datasets for several tasks. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. We follow the blueprint of the Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) benchmark suite. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will be publishing for each task (i) annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) annotated development and test sets, and (iii) baseline models for easy reproducibility and comparisons. In this work, we present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also perform sensitivity analysis of pipeline models' performance (speech recognizer + text model) to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 state-of-the-art speech recognition models.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models can be trained on sensitive information such as phone numbers, zip-codes etc. Recent literature has focused on Model Inversion Attacks (ModIvA) that can extract training data from model parameters. In this work, we present a version of such an attack by extracting canaries inserted in NLU training data. In the attack, an adversary with open-box access to the model reconstructs the canaries contained in the model's training set. We evaluate our approach by performing text completion on canaries and demonstrate that by using the prefix (non-sensitive) tokens of the canary, we can generate the full canary. As an example, our attack is able to reconstruct a four digit code in the training dataset of the NLU model with a probability of 0.5 in its best configuration. As countermeasures, we identify several defense mechanisms that, when combined, effectively eliminate the risk of ModIvA in our experiments.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks are usually solved by first transcribing an utterance with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then feeding the output to a text-based model. Recent advances in self-supervised representation learning for speech data have focused on improving the ASR component. We investigate whether representation learning for speech has matured enough to replace ASR in SLU. We compare learned speech features from wav2vec 2.0, state-of-the-art ASR transcripts, and the ground truth text as input for a novel speech-based named entity recognition task, a cardiac arrest detection task on real-world emergency calls and two existing SLU benchmarks. We show that learned speech features are superior to ASR transcripts on three classification tasks. For machine translation, ASR transcripts are still the better choice. We highlight the intrinsic robustness of wav2vec 2.0 representations to out-of-vocabulary words as key to better performance.

Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements\ are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a collection of datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of legal NLU tasks in a standardized way. We also provide an evaluation and analysis of several generic and legal-oriented models demonstrating that the latter consistently offer performance improvements across multiple tasks.

Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its upstream automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transform the voice into text. In this case, the upstream perturbations, e.g. ASR errors, environmental noise and careless user speaking, will propagate to the ID and SF models, thus deteriorating the system performance. Therefore, the well-performing SF and ID models are expected to be noise resistant to some extent. However, existing models are trained on clean data, which causes a gap between clean data training and real-world inference. To bridge the gap, we propose a method from the perspective of domain adaptation, by which both high- and low-quality samples are embedding into similar vector space. Meanwhile, we design a denoising generation model to reduce the impact of the low-quality samples. Experiments on the widely-used dataset, i.e. Snips, and large scale in-house dataset (10 million training examples) demonstrate that this method not only outperforms the baseline models on real-world (noisy) corpus but also enhances the robustness, that is, it produces high-quality results under a noisy environment. The source code will be released.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) aims to extract the semantics frame of user queries, which is a core component in a task-oriented dialog system. With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of pre-trained language models, the research of SLU has obtained significant breakthroughs. However, there remains a lack of a comprehensive survey summarizing existing approaches and recent trends, which motivated the work presented in this article. In this paper, we survey recent advances and new frontiers in SLU. Specifically, we give a thorough review of this research field, covering different aspects including (1) new taxonomy: we provide a new perspective for SLU filed, including single model vs. joint model, implicit joint modeling vs. explicit joint modeling in joint model, non pre-trained paradigm vs. pre-trained paradigm;(2) new frontiers: some emerging areas in complex SLU as well as the corresponding challenges; (3) abundant open-source resources: to help the community, we have collected, organized the related papers, baseline projects and leaderboard on a public website where SLU researchers could directly access to the recent progress. We hope that this survey can shed a light on future research in SLU field.

Most language understanding models in task-oriented dialog systems are trained on a small amount of annotated training data, and evaluated in a small set from the same distribution. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable output when being exposed to natural language perturbation or variation in practice. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive evaluation and analysis with respect to the robustness of natural language understanding models, and introduce three important aspects related to language understanding in real-world dialog systems, namely, language variety, speech characteristics, and noise perturbation. We propose a model-agnostic toolkit LAUG to approximate natural language perturbations for testing the robustness issues in task-oriented dialog. Four data augmentation approaches covering the three aspects are assembled in LAUG, which reveals critical robustness issues in state-of-the-art models. The augmented dataset through LAUG can be used to facilitate future research on the robustness testing of language understanding in task-oriented dialog.

Spoken Language Understanding infers semantic meaning directly from audio data, and thus promises to reduce error propagation and misunderstandings in end-user applications. However, publicly available SLU resources are limited. In this paper, we release SLURP, a new SLU package containing the following: (1) A new challenging dataset in English spanning 18 domains, which is substantially bigger and linguistically more diverse than existing datasets; (2) Competitive baselines based on state-of-the-art NLU and ASR systems; (3) A new transparent metric for entity labelling which enables a detailed error analysis for identifying potential areas of improvement. SLURP is available at https: //github.com/pswietojanski/slurp.

Different flavors of transfer learning have shown tremendous impact in advancing research and applications of machine learning. In this work we study the use of a specific family of transfer learning, where the target domain is mapped to the source domain. Specifically we map Natural Language Understanding (NLU) problems to QuestionAnswering (QA) problems and we show that in low data regimes this approach offers significant improvements compared to other approaches to NLU. Moreover we show that these gains could be increased through sequential transfer learning across NLU problems from different domains. We show that our approach could reduce the amount of required data for the same performance by up to a factor of 10.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is an established component within a conversational AI or digital assistant system, and it is responsible for producing semantic understanding of a user request. We propose a scalable and automatic approach for improving NLU in a large-scale conversational AI system by leveraging implicit user feedback, with an insight that user interaction data and dialog context have rich information embedded from which user satisfaction and intention can be inferred. In particular, we propose a general domain-agnostic framework for curating new supervision data for improving NLU from live production traffic. With an extensive set of experiments, we show the results of applying the framework and improving NLU for a large-scale production system and show its impact across 10 domains.

This is a lecture note for the course DS-GA 3001 <Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation> at the Center for Data Science , New York University in Fall, 2015. As the name of the course suggests, this lecture note introduces readers to a neural network based approach to natural language understanding/processing. In order to make it as self-contained as possible, I spend much time on describing basics of machine learning and neural networks, only after which how they are used for natural languages is introduced. On the language front, I almost solely focus on language modelling and machine translation, two of which I personally find most fascinating and most fundamental to natural language understanding.

Large-scale pretraining and instruction tuning have been successful for training general-purpose language models with broad competencies. However, extending to general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the distributional diversity in visual inputs. A recent line of work explores vision-language instruction tuning, taking inspiration from the Query Transformer (QFormer) approach proposed in BLIP-2 models for bridging frozen modalities. However, these approaches rely heavily on large-scale multi-modal pretraining for representation learning before eventual finetuning, incurring a huge computational overhead, poor scaling, and limited accessibility. To that end, we propose a more efficient method for QFormer-based vision-language alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy compared to existing baselines in improving the efficiency of vision-language pretraining.

Understanding procedural natural language (e.g., step-by-step instructions) is a crucial step to execution and planning. However, while there are ample corpora and downstream tasks available in English, the field lacks such resources for most languages. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Turkish procedural texts. We first expand the number of tutorials in Turkish wikiHow from 2,000 to 52,000 using automated translation tools, where the translation quality and loyalty to the original meaning are validated by a team of experts on a random set. Then, we generate several downstream tasks on the corpus, such as linking actions, goal inference, and summarization. To tackle these tasks, we implement strong baseline models via fine-tuning large language-specific models such as TR-BART and BERTurk, as well as multilingual models such as mBART, mT5, and XLM. We find that language-specific models consistently outperform their multilingual models by a significant margin across most procedural language understanding (PLU) tasks. We release our corpus, downstream tasks and the baseline models with https://github.com/ GGLAB-KU/turkish-plu.

Large language models (LLMs), built on decoder-only transformers, excel in natural language generation and adapt to diverse tasks using zero-shot and few-shot prompting. However, these prompting methods often struggle on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, where encoder-only models like BERT-base outperform LLMs on benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE. This paper explores two approaches-supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and proximal policy optimization (PPO)-to enhance LLMs' NLU abilities. To reduce the cost of full-model fine-tuning, we integrate low-rank adaptation (LoRA) layers, limiting updates to these layers during both SFT and PPO. In SFT, task-specific prompts are concatenated with input queries and ground-truth labels, optimizing with next-token prediction. Despite this, LLMs still underperform compared to models like BERT-base on several NLU tasks. To close this gap, we apply PPO, a reinforcement learning technique that treats each token generation as an action and uses a reward function based on alignment with ground-truth answers. PPO then updates the model to maximize these rewards, aligning outputs with correct labels. Our experiments with LLAMA2-7B show that PPO improves performance, with a 6.3-point gain over SFT on GLUE. PPO exceeds zero-shot by 38.7 points and few-shot by 26.1 points on GLUE, while surpassing these by 28.8 and 28.5 points on SuperGLUE. Additionally, PPO outperforms BERT-large by 2.7 points on GLUE and 9.3 points on SuperGLUE. The improvements are consistent across models like Qwen2.5-7B and MPT-7B, highlighting PPO's robustness in enhancing LLMs' NLU capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the potential to significantly contribute to patient care, diagnostics, and administrative processes. Emerging biomedical LLMs address healthcare-specific challenges, including privacy demands and computational constraints. However, evaluation of these models has primarily been limited to non-clinical tasks, which do not reflect the complexity of practical clinical applications. Additionally, there has been no thorough comparison between biomedical and general-domain LLMs for clinical tasks. To fill this gap, we present the Clinical Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE), a benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs on real-world clinical tasks. CLUE includes two novel datasets derived from MIMIC IV discharge letters and four existing tasks designed to test the practical applicability of LLMs in healthcare settings. Our evaluation covers several biomedical and general domain LLMs, providing insights into their clinical performance and applicability. CLUE represents a step towards a standardized approach to evaluating and developing LLMs in healthcare to align future model development with the real-world needs of clinical application. We publish our evaluation and data generation scripts: https://github.com/dadaamin/CLUE

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive, so it is difficult to efficiently execute them on resource-restricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we first propose a novel Transformer distillation method that is specially designed for knowledge distillation (KD) of the Transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large teacher BERT can be effectively transferred to a small student Tiny-BERT. Then, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs Transformer distillation at both the pretraining and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture he general-domain as well as the task-specific knowledge in BERT. TinyBERT with 4 layers is empirically effective and achieves more than 96.8% the performance of its teacher BERTBASE on GLUE benchmark, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT with 4 layers is also significantly better than 4-layer state-of-the-art baselines on BERT distillation, with only about 28% parameters and about 31% inference time of them. Moreover, TinyBERT with 6 layers performs on-par with its teacher BERTBASE.

The performance differential of large language models (LLM) between languages hinders their effective deployment in many regions, inhibiting the potential economic and societal value of generative AI tools in many communities. However, the development of functional LLMs in many languages (\ie, multilingual LLMs) is bottlenecked by the lack of high-quality evaluation resources in languages other than English. Moreover, current practices in multilingual benchmark construction often translate English resources, ignoring the regional and cultural knowledge of the environments in which multilingual systems would be used. In this work, we construct an evaluation suite of 197,243 QA pairs from local exam sources to measure the capabilities of multilingual LLMs in a variety of regional contexts. Our novel resource, INCLUDE, is a comprehensive knowledge- and reasoning-centric benchmark across 44 written languages that evaluates multilingual LLMs for performance in the actual language environments where they would be deployed.

Most current LLM-based models for video understanding can process videos within minutes. However, they struggle with lengthy videos due to challenges such as "noise and redundancy", as well as "memory and computation" constraints. In this paper, we present Goldfish, a methodology tailored for comprehending videos of arbitrary lengths. We also introduce the TVQA-long benchmark, specifically designed to evaluate models' capabilities in understanding long videos with questions in both vision and text content. Goldfish approaches these challenges with an efficient retrieval mechanism that initially gathers the top-k video clips relevant to the instruction before proceeding to provide the desired response. This design of the retrieval mechanism enables the Goldfish to efficiently process arbitrarily long video sequences, facilitating its application in contexts such as movies or television series. To facilitate the retrieval process, we developed MiniGPT4-Video that generates detailed descriptions for the video clips. In addressing the scarcity of benchmarks for long video evaluation, we adapted the TVQA short video benchmark for extended content analysis by aggregating questions from entire episodes, thereby shifting the evaluation from partial to full episode comprehension. We attained a 41.78% accuracy rate on the TVQA-long benchmark, surpassing previous methods by 14.94%. Our MiniGPT4-Video also shows exceptional performance in short video comprehension, exceeding existing state-of-the-art methods by 3.23%, 2.03%, 16.5% and 23.59% on the MSVD, MSRVTT, TGIF, and TVQA short video benchmarks, respectively. These results indicate that our models have significant improvements in both long and short-video understanding. Our models and code have been made publicly available at https://vision-cair.github.io/Goldfish_website/

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has drawn substantial attention in the field recently. This work focuses on evaluating LLMs in a Chinese context, specifically, for Traditional Chinese which has been largely underrepresented in existing benchmarks. We present TMLU, a holistic evaluation suit tailored for assessing the advanced knowledge and reasoning capability in LLMs, under the context of Taiwanese Mandarin. TMLU consists of an array of 37 subjects across social science, STEM, humanities, Taiwan-specific content, and others, ranging from middle school to professional levels. In addition, we curate chain-of-thought-like few-shot explanations for each subject to facilitate the evaluation of complex reasoning skills. To establish a comprehensive baseline, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on 24 advanced LLMs. The results suggest that Chinese open-weight models demonstrate inferior performance comparing to multilingual proprietary ones, and open-weight models tailored for Taiwanese Mandarin lag behind the Simplified-Chinese counterparts. The findings indicate great headrooms for improvement, and emphasize the goal of TMLU to foster the development of localized Taiwanese-Mandarin LLMs. We release the benchmark and evaluation scripts for the community to promote future research.

For natural language understanding (NLU) technology to be maximally useful, both practically and as a scientific object of study, it must be general: it must be able to process language in a way that is not exclusively tailored to any one specific task or dataset. In pursuit of this objective, we introduce the General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark (GLUE), a tool for evaluating and analyzing the performance of models across a diverse range of existing NLU tasks. GLUE is model-agnostic, but it incentivizes sharing knowledge across tasks because certain tasks have very limited training data. We further provide a hand-crafted diagnostic test suite that enables detailed linguistic analysis of NLU models. We evaluate baselines based on current methods for multi-task and transfer learning and find that they do not immediately give substantial improvements over the aggregate performance of training a separate model per task, indicating room for improvement in developing general and robust NLU systems.

Spoken semantic parsing (SSP) involves generating machine-comprehensible parses from input speech. Training robust models for existing application domains represented in training data or extending to new domains requires corresponding triplets of speech-transcript-semantic parse data, which is expensive to obtain. In this paper, we address this challenge by examining methods that can use transcript-semantic parse data (unpaired text) without corresponding speech. First, when unpaired text is drawn from existing textual corpora, Joint Audio Text (JAT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) are compared as ways to generate speech representations for unpaired text. Experiments on the STOP dataset show that unpaired text from existing and new domains improves performance by 2% and 30% in absolute Exact Match (EM) respectively. Second, we consider the setting when unpaired text is not available in existing textual corpora. We propose to prompt Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate unpaired text for existing and new domains. Experiments show that examples and words that co-occur with intents can be used to generate unpaired text with Llama 2.0. Using the generated text with JAT and TTS for spoken semantic parsing improves EM on STOP by 1.4% and 2.6% absolute for existing and new domains respectively.

We propose a new test to measure a text model's multitask accuracy. The test covers 57 tasks including elementary mathematics, US history, computer science, law, and more. To attain high accuracy on this test, models must possess extensive world knowledge and problem solving ability. We find that while most recent models have near random-chance accuracy, the very largest GPT-3 model improves over random chance by almost 20 percentage points on average. However, on every one of the 57 tasks, the best models still need substantial improvements before they can reach expert-level accuracy. Models also have lopsided performance and frequently do not know when they are wrong. Worse, they still have near-random accuracy on some socially important subjects such as morality and law. By comprehensively evaluating the breadth and depth of a model's academic and professional understanding, our test can be used to analyze models across many tasks and to identify important shortcomings.

Surveillance videos are an essential component of daily life with various critical applications, particularly in public security. However, current surveillance video tasks mainly focus on classifying and localizing anomalous events. Existing methods are limited to detecting and classifying the predefined events with unsatisfactory semantic understanding, although they have obtained considerable performance. To address this issue, we propose a new research direction of surveillance video-and-language understanding, and construct the first multimodal surveillance video dataset. We manually annotate the real-world surveillance dataset UCF-Crime with fine-grained event content and timing. Our newly annotated dataset, UCA (UCF-Crime Annotation), contains 23,542 sentences, with an average length of 20 words, and its annotated videos are as long as 110.7 hours. Furthermore, we benchmark SOTA models for four multimodal tasks on this newly created dataset, which serve as new baselines for surveillance video-and-language understanding. Through our experiments, we find that mainstream models used in previously publicly available datasets perform poorly on surveillance video, which demonstrates the new challenges in surveillance video-and-language understanding. To validate the effectiveness of our UCA, we conducted experiments on multimodal anomaly detection. The results demonstrate that our multimodal surveillance learning can improve the performance of conventional anomaly detection tasks. All the experiments highlight the necessity of constructing this dataset to advance surveillance AI. The link to our dataset is provided at: https://xuange923.github.io/Surveillance-Video-Understanding.

We present HourVideo, a benchmark dataset for hour-long video-language understanding. Our dataset consists of a novel task suite comprising summarization, perception (recall, tracking), visual reasoning (spatial, temporal, predictive, causal, counterfactual), and navigation (room-to-room, object retrieval) tasks. HourVideo includes 500 manually curated egocentric videos from the Ego4D dataset, spanning durations of 20 to 120 minutes, and features 12,976 high-quality, five-way multiple-choice questions. Benchmarking results reveal that multimodal models, including GPT-4 and LLaVA-NeXT, achieve marginal improvements over random chance. In stark contrast, human experts significantly outperform the state-of-the-art long-context multimodal model, Gemini Pro 1.5 (85.0% vs. 37.3%), highlighting a substantial gap in multimodal capabilities. Our benchmark, evaluation toolkit, prompts, and documentation are available at https://hourvideo.stanford.edu

The focus of language model evaluation has transitioned towards reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks, driven by advancements in pretraining large models. While state-of-the-art models are partially trained on large Arabic texts, evaluating their performance in Arabic remains challenging due to the limited availability of relevant datasets. To bridge this gap, we present ArabicMMLU, the first multi-task language understanding benchmark for Arabic language, sourced from school exams across diverse educational levels in different countries spanning North Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf regions. Our data comprises 40 tasks and 14,575 multiple-choice questions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and is carefully constructed by collaborating with native speakers in the region. Our comprehensive evaluations of 35 models reveal substantial room for improvement, particularly among the best open-source models. Notably, BLOOMZ, mT0, LLama2, and Falcon struggle to achieve a score of 50%, while even the top-performing Arabic-centric model only achieves a score of 62.3%.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing (NLP), with models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 achieving impressive capabilities in various linguistic tasks. However, training models on such a large scale is challenging, and finding datasets that match the model's scale is often difficult. Fine-tuning and training models with fewer parameters using novel methods have emerged as promising approaches to overcome these challenges. One such model is MiniGPT-4, which achieves comparable vision-language understanding to GPT-4 by leveraging novel pre-training models and innovative training strategies. However, the model still faces some challenges in image understanding, particularly in artistic pictures. A novel multimodal model called ArtGPT-4 has been proposed to address these limitations. ArtGPT-4 was trained on image-text pairs using a Tesla A100 device in just 2 hours, using only about 200 GB of data. The model can depict images with an artistic flair and generate visual code, including aesthetically pleasing HTML/CSS web pages. Furthermore, the article proposes novel benchmarks for evaluating the performance of vision-language models. In the subsequent evaluation methods, ArtGPT-4 scored more than 1 point higher than the current state-of-the-art model and was only 0.25 points lower than artists on a 6-point scale. Our code and pre-trained model are available at https://huggingface.co./Tyrannosaurus/ArtGPT-4.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to improve the generalization performance of natural language understanding models by leveraging large amounts of data during the pre-training phase. However, the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks, limiting the real-world deployment of these methods. This paper presents the first attempt at creating a unified benchmark named GLUE-X for evaluating OOD robustness in NLP models, highlighting the importance of OOD robustness and providing insights on how to measure the robustness of a model and how to improve it. The benchmark includes 13 publicly available datasets for OOD testing, and evaluations are conducted on 8 classic NLP tasks over 21 popularly used PLMs, including GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. Our findings confirm the need for improved OOD accuracy in NLP tasks, as significant performance degradation was observed in all settings compared to in-distribution (ID) accuracy.

Prevailing deep models are single-purpose and overspecialize at individual tasks. However, when being extended to new tasks, they typically forget previously learned skills and learn from scratch. We address this issue by introducing SkillNet-NLU, a general-purpose model that stitches together existing skills to learn new tasks more effectively. The key feature of our approach is that it is sparsely activated guided by predefined skills. Different from traditional dense models that always activate all the model parameters, SkillNet-NLU only activates parts of the model parameters whose skills are relevant to the target task. When learning for a new task, our approach precisely activates required skills and also provides an option to add new skills. We evaluate on natural language understandings tasks and have the following findings. First, with only one model checkpoint, SkillNet-NLU performs better than task-specific fine-tuning and two multi-task learning baselines (i.e., dense model and Mixture-of-Experts model) on six tasks. Second, sparsely activated pre-training further improves the overall performance. Third, SkillNet-NLU significantly outperforms baseline systems when being extended to new tasks.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

High-quality, large-scale instructions are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs), however, there is a severe shortage of instruction in the field of natural language understanding (NLU). Previous works on constructing NLU instructions mainly focus on information extraction (IE), neglecting tasks such as machine reading comprehension, question answering, and text classification. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in the data has led to a decreased generalization ability of trained LLMs in other NLU tasks and a noticeable decline in the fundamental model's general capabilities. To address this issue, we propose Hum, a large-scale, high-quality synthetic instruction corpus for NLU tasks, designed to enhance the NLU capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, Hum includes IE (either close IE or open IE), machine reading comprehension, text classification, and instruction generalist tasks, thereby enriching task diversity. Additionally, we introduce a human-LLMs collaborative mechanism to synthesize instructions, which enriches instruction diversity by incorporating guidelines, preference rules, and format variants. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 NLU tasks and 28 general capability evaluation datasets for LLMs. Experimental results show that Hum enhances the NLU capabilities of six LLMs by an average of 3.1\%, with no significant decline observed in other general capabilities.

Sign language pre-training has gained increasing attention for its ability to enhance performance across various sign language understanding (SLU) tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from a gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal results. To address this, we propose Uni-Sign, a unified pre-training framework that eliminates the gap between pre-training and downstream SLU tasks through a large-scale generative pre-training strategy and a novel fine-tuning paradigm. First, we introduce CSL-News, a large-scale Chinese Sign Language (CSL) dataset containing 1,985 hours of video paired with textual annotations, which enables effective large-scale pre-training. Second, Uni-Sign unifies SLU tasks by treating downstream tasks as a single sign language translation (SLT) task during fine-tuning, ensuring seamless knowledge transfer between pre-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, we incorporate a prior-guided fusion (PGF) module and a score-aware sampling strategy to efficiently fuse pose and RGB information, addressing keypoint inaccuracies and improving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple SLU benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-Sign achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream SLU tasks. Dataset and code are available at github.com/ZechengLi19/Uni-Sign.

While recent multilingual automatic speech recognition models claim to support thousands of languages, ASR for low-resource languages remains highly unreliable due to limited bimodal speech and text training data. Better multilingual spoken language understanding (SLU) can strengthen massively the robustness of multilingual ASR by levering language semantics to compensate for scarce training data, such as disambiguating utterances via context or exploiting semantic similarities across languages. Even more so, SLU is indispensable for inclusive speech technology in roughly half of all living languages that lack a formal writing system. However, the evaluation of multilingual SLU remains limited to shallower tasks such as intent classification or language identification. To address this, we present Fleurs-SLU, a multilingual SLU benchmark that encompasses topical speech classification in 102 languages and multiple-choice question answering through listening comprehension in 92 languages. We extensively evaluate both end-to-end speech classification models and cascaded systems that combine speech-to-text transcription with subsequent classification by large language models on Fleurs-SLU. Our results show that cascaded systems exhibit greater robustness in multilingual SLU tasks, though speech encoders can achieve competitive performance in topical speech classification when appropriately pre-trained. We further find a strong correlation between robust multilingual ASR, effective speech-to-text translation, and strong multilingual SLU, highlighting the mutual benefits between acoustic and semantic speech representations.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential across various downstream tasks that require cross-domain knowledge. MLLMs capable of processing videos, known as Video-MLLMs, have attracted broad interest in video-language understanding. However, videos, especially long videos, contain more visual tokens than images, making them difficult for LLMs to process. Existing works either downsample visual features or extend the LLM context size, risking the loss of high-resolution information or slowing down inference speed. To address these limitations, we apply cross-attention layers in the intermediate projector between the visual encoder and the large language model (LLM). As the naive cross-attention mechanism is insensitive to temporal order, we further introduce causal cross-attention masks (CCAMs) within the cross-attention layers. This Video-MLLM, named Video-CCAM, is trained in a straightforward two-stage fashion: feature alignment and visual instruction tuning. We develop several Video-CCAM models based on LLMs of different sizes (4B, 9B, and 14B). Video-CCAM proves to be a robust Video-MLLM and shows outstanding performance from short videos to long ones. Among standard video benchmarks like MVBench and VideoChatGPT-QA, Video-CCAM shows outstanding performances (1st/2nd/3rd in MVBench and TGIF-QA, 2nd/3rd/4th in MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and ActivityNet-QA). In benchmarks encompassing long videos, Video-CCAM models can be directly adapted to long video understanding and still achieve exceptional scores despite being trained solely with images and 16-frame videos. Using 96 frames (6times the training number of frames), Video-CCAM models rank 1st/2nd/3rd in VideoVista and 1st/2nd/4th in MLVU among all open-source Video-MLLMs, respectively. The code is publicly available in https://github.com/QQ-MM/Video-CCAM.

Long-horizon planning is hindered by challenges such as uncertainty accumulation, computational complexity, delayed rewards and incomplete information. This work proposes an approach to exploit the task hierarchy from human instructions to facilitate multi-robot planning. Using Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a two-step approach to translate multi-sentence instructions into a structured language, Hierarchical Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), which serves as a formal representation for planning. Initially, LLMs transform the instructions into a hierarchical representation defined as Hierarchical Task Tree, capturing the logical and temporal relations among tasks. Following this, a domain-specific fine-tuning of LLM translates sub-tasks of each task into flat LTL formulas, aggregating them to form hierarchical LTL specifications. These specifications are then leveraged for planning using off-the-shelf planners. Our framework not only bridges the gap between instructions and algorithmic planning but also showcases the potential of LLMs in harnessing hierarchical reasoning to automate multi-robot task planning. Through evaluations in both simulation and real-world experiments involving human participants, we demonstrate that our method can handle more complex instructions compared to existing methods. The results indicate that our approach achieves higher success rates and lower costs in multi-robot task allocation and plan generation. Demos videos are available at https://youtu.be/7WOrDKxIMIs .

Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs' understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU.

Zero-shot spoken language understanding (SLU) enables systems to comprehend user utterances in new domains without prior exposure to training data. Recent studies often rely on large language models (LLMs), leading to excessive footprints and complexity. This paper proposes the use of Whisper, a standalone speech processing model, for zero-shot end-to-end (E2E) SLU. To handle unseen semantic labels, SLU tasks are integrated into a question-answering (QA) framework, which prompts the Whisper decoder for semantics deduction. The system is efficiently trained with prefix-tuning, optimising a minimal set of parameters rather than the entire Whisper model. We show that the proposed system achieves a 40.7% absolute gain for slot filling (SLU-F1) on SLURP compared to a recently introduced zero-shot benchmark. Furthermore, it performs comparably to a Whisper-GPT-2 modular system under both in-corpus and cross-corpus evaluation settings, but with a relative 34.8% reduction in model parameters.

Large Vision-Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative phenomena such as metaphors or humor, the meaning of which is often implicit. To close this gap, we propose a new task and a high-quality dataset: Visual Figurative Language Understanding with Textual Explanations (V-FLUTE). We frame the visual figurative language understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a claim (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. Using a human-AI collaboration framework, we build a high-quality dataset, V-FLUTE, that contains 6,027 <image, claim, label, explanation> instances spanning five diverse multimodal figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. We further conduct both automatic and human evaluations to assess current VLMs' capabilities in understanding figurative phenomena.

The success of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmarks in various languages, such as GLUE for English, CLUE for Chinese, KLUE for Korean, and IndoNLU for Indonesian, has facilitated the evaluation of new NLU models across a wide range of tasks. To establish a standardized set of benchmarks for Vietnamese NLU, we introduce the first Vietnamese Language Understanding Evaluation (VLUE) benchmark. The VLUE benchmark encompasses five datasets covering different NLU tasks, including text classification, span extraction, and natural language understanding. To provide an insightful overview of the current state of Vietnamese NLU, we then evaluate seven state-of-the-art pre-trained models, including both multilingual and Vietnamese monolingual models, on our proposed VLUE benchmark. Furthermore, we present CafeBERT, a new state-of-the-art pre-trained model that achieves superior results across all tasks in the VLUE benchmark. Our model combines the proficiency of a multilingual pre-trained model with Vietnamese linguistic knowledge. CafeBERT is developed based on the XLM-RoBERTa model, with an additional pretraining step utilizing a significant amount of Vietnamese textual data to enhance its adaptation to the Vietnamese language. For the purpose of future research, CafeBERT is made publicly available for research purposes.

We propose KMMLU, a new Korean benchmark with 35,030 expert-level multiple-choice questions across 45 subjects ranging from humanities to STEM. Unlike previous Korean benchmarks that are translated from existing English benchmarks, KMMLU is collected from original Korean exams, capturing linguistic and cultural aspects of the Korean language. We test 26 publically available and proprietary LLMs, identifying significant room for improvement. The best publicly available model achieves 50.54% on KMMLU, far below the average human performance of 62.6%. This model was primarily trained for English and Chinese, not Korean. Current LLMs tailored to Korean, such as Polyglot-Ko, perform far worse. Surprisingly, even the most capable proprietary LLMs, e.g., GPT-4 and HyperCLOVA X, achieve 59.95% and 53.40%, respectively. This suggests that further work is needed to improve Korean LLMs, and KMMLU offers the right tool to track this progress. We make our dataset publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub and integrate the benchmark into EleutherAI's Language Model Evaluation Harness.

The evaluation of Natural Language Generation (NLG) models has gained increased attention, urging the development of metrics that evaluate various aspects of generated text. LUNA addresses this challenge by introducing a unified interface for 20 NLG evaluation metrics. These metrics are categorized based on their reference-dependence and the type of text representation they employ, from string-based n-gram overlap to the utilization of static embeddings and pre-trained language models. The straightforward design of LUNA allows for easy extension with novel metrics, requiring just a few lines of code. LUNA offers a user-friendly tool for evaluating generated texts.

The ability to perceive how objects change over time is a crucial ingredient in human intelligence. However, current benchmarks cannot faithfully reflect the temporal understanding abilities of video-language models (VidLMs) due to the existence of static visual shortcuts. To remedy this issue, we present VITATECS, a diagnostic VIdeo-Text dAtaset for the evaluation of TEmporal Concept underStanding. Specifically, we first introduce a fine-grained taxonomy of temporal concepts in natural language in order to diagnose the capability of VidLMs to comprehend different temporal aspects. Furthermore, to disentangle the correlation between static and temporal information, we generate counterfactual video descriptions that differ from the original one only in the specified temporal aspect. We employ a semi-automatic data collection framework using large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to obtain high-quality counterfactual descriptions efficiently. Evaluation of representative video-language understanding models confirms their deficiency in temporal understanding, revealing the need for greater emphasis on the temporal elements in video-language research.

Language models can serve as a valuable tool for software developers to increase productivity. Large generative models can be used for code generation and code completion, while smaller encoder-only models are capable of performing code search tasks using natural language queries.These capabilities are heavily influenced by the quality and diversity of the available training data. Source code datasets used for training usually focus on the most popular languages and testing is mostly conducted on the same distributions, often overlooking low-resource programming languages. Motivated by the NLP generalization taxonomy proposed by Hupkes et.\,al., we propose a new benchmark dataset called GenCodeSearchNet (GeCS) which builds upon existing natural language code search datasets to systemically evaluate the programming language understanding generalization capabilities of language models. As part of the full dataset, we introduce a new, manually curated subset StatCodeSearch that focuses on R, a popular but so far underrepresented programming language that is often used by researchers outside the field of computer science. For evaluation and comparison, we collect several baseline results using fine-tuned BERT-style models and GPT-style large language models in a zero-shot setting.

Recent work on speech representation models jointly pre-trained with text has demonstrated the potential of improving speech representations by encoding speech and text in a shared space. In this paper, we leverage such shared representations to address the persistent challenge of limited data availability in spoken language understanding tasks. By employing a pre-trained speech-text model, we find that models fine-tuned on text can be effectively transferred to speech testing data. With as little as 1 hour of labeled speech data, our proposed approach achieves comparable performance on spoken language understanding tasks (specifically, sentiment analysis and named entity recognition) when compared to previous methods using speech-only pre-trained models fine-tuned on 10 times more data. Beyond the proof-of-concept study, we also analyze the latent representations. We find that the bottom layers of speech-text models are largely task-agnostic and align speech and text representations into a shared space, while the top layers are more task-specific.

Recently, neural networks have shown impressive progress across diverse fields, with speech processing being no exception. However, recent breakthroughs in this area require extensive offline training using large datasets and tremendous computing resources. Unfortunately, these models struggle to retain their previously acquired knowledge when learning new tasks continually, and retraining from scratch is almost always impractical. In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning sequence-to-sequence models for spoken language understanding in a class-incremental learning (CIL) setting and we propose COCONUT, a CIL method that relies on the combination of experience replay and contrastive learning. Through a modified version of the standard supervised contrastive loss applied only to the rehearsal samples, COCONUT preserves the learned representations by pulling closer samples from the same class and pushing away the others. Moreover, we leverage a multimodal contrastive loss that helps the model learn more discriminative representations of the new data by aligning audio and text features. We also investigate different contrastive designs to combine the strengths of the contrastive loss with teacher-student architectures used for distillation. Experiments on two established SLU datasets reveal the effectiveness of our proposed approach and significant improvements over the baselines. We also show that COCONUT can be combined with methods that operate on the decoder side of the model, resulting in further metrics improvements.

We present ToddlerBERTa, a BabyBERTa-like language model, exploring its capabilities through five different models with varied hyperparameters. Evaluating on BLiMP, SuperGLUE, MSGS, and a Supplement benchmark from the BabyLM challenge, we find that smaller models can excel in specific tasks, while larger models perform well with substantial data. Despite training on a smaller dataset, ToddlerBERTa demonstrates commendable performance, rivalling the state-of-the-art RoBERTa-base. The model showcases robust language understanding, even with single-sentence pretraining, and competes with baselines that leverage broader contextual information. Our work provides insights into hyperparameter choices, and data utilization, contributing to the advancement of language models.

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, evaluating their performance becomes increasingly crucial and challenging. This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing CMMLU, a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that covers various subjects, including natural science, social sciences, engineering, and humanities. We conduct a thorough evaluation of 18 advanced multilingual- and Chinese-oriented LLMs, assessing their performance across different subjects and settings. The results reveal that most existing LLMs struggle to achieve an average accuracy of 50%, even when provided with in-context examples and chain-of-thought prompts, whereas the random baseline stands at 25%. This highlights significant room for improvement in LLMs. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to identify factors impacting the models' performance and propose directions for enhancing LLMs. CMMLU fills the gap in evaluating the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large language models within the Chinese context.

We present bgGLUE(Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at https://bgglue.github.io/, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.

Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in language models (LMs). However, the use of figurative language is an expression of our cultural and societal experiences, making it difficult for these phrases to be universally applicable. In this work, we create a figurative language inference dataset, \datasetname, for seven diverse languages associated with a variety of cultures: Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba. Our dataset reveals that each language relies on cultural and regional concepts for figurative expressions, with the highest overlap between languages originating from the same region. We assess multilingual LMs' abilities to interpret figurative language in zero-shot and few-shot settings. All languages exhibit a significant deficiency compared to English, with variations in performance reflecting the availability of pre-training and fine-tuning data, emphasizing the need for LMs to be exposed to a broader range of linguistic and cultural variation during training.

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired a surge of research exploring their expansion into the visual domain. While recent models exhibit promise in generating abstract captions for images and conducting natural conversations, their performance on text-rich images leaves room for improvement. In this paper, we propose the Contrastive Reading Model (Cream), a novel neural architecture designed to enhance the language-image understanding capability of LLMs by capturing intricate details typically overlooked by existing methods. Cream integrates vision and auxiliary encoders, complemented by a contrastive feature alignment technique, resulting in a more effective understanding of textual information within document images. Our approach, thus, seeks to bridge the gap between vision and language understanding, paving the way for more sophisticated Document Intelligence Assistants. Rigorous evaluations across diverse tasks, such as visual question answering on document images, demonstrate the efficacy of Cream as a state-of-the-art model in the field of visual document understanding. We provide our codebase and newly-generated datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/cream

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) remains elusive even with current large pretrained language models on text and speech, especially in multilingual cases. Machine translation has been established as a powerful pretraining objective on text as it enables the model to capture high-level semantics of the input utterance and associations between different languages, which is desired for speech models that work on lower-level acoustic frames. Motivated particularly by the task of cross-lingual SLU, we demonstrate that the task of speech translation (ST) is a good means of pretraining speech models for end-to-end SLU on both intra- and cross-lingual scenarios. By introducing ST, our models reach higher performance over baselines on monolingual and multilingual intent classification as well as spoken question answering using SLURP, MINDS-14, and NMSQA benchmarks. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we also create new benchmark datasets from both synthetic and real sources, for speech summarization and low-resource/zero-shot transfer from English to French or Spanish. We further show the value of preserving knowledge for the ST pretraining task for better downstream performance, possibly using Bayesian transfer regularizers.

The recent GPT-4 has demonstrated extraordinary multi-modal abilities, such as directly generating websites from handwritten text and identifying humorous elements within images. These features are rarely observed in previous vision-language models. We believe the primary reason for GPT-4's advanced multi-modal generation capabilities lies in the utilization of a more advanced large language model (LLM). To examine this phenomenon, we present MiniGPT-4, which aligns a frozen visual encoder with a frozen LLM, Vicuna, using just one projection layer. Our findings reveal that MiniGPT-4 possesses many capabilities similar to those exhibited by GPT-4 like detailed image description generation and website creation from hand-written drafts. Furthermore, we also observe other emerging capabilities in MiniGPT-4, including writing stories and poems inspired by given images, providing solutions to problems shown in images, teaching users how to cook based on food photos, etc. In our experiment, we found that only performing the pretraining on raw image-text pairs could produce unnatural language outputs that lack coherency including repetition and fragmented sentences. To address this problem, we curate a high-quality, well-aligned dataset in the second stage to finetune our model using a conversational template. This step proved crucial for augmenting the model's generation reliability and overall usability. Notably, our model is highly computationally efficient, as we only train a projection layer utilizing approximately 5 million aligned image-text pairs. Our code, pre-trained model, and collected dataset are available at https://minigpt-4.github.io/.

Language models have steadily increased in size over the past few years. They achieve a high level of performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering and summarization. Large language models (LLMs) have been used for generation and can now output human-like text. Due to this, there are other downstream tasks in the realm of dialog that can now harness the LLMs' language understanding capabilities. Dialog evaluation is one task that this paper will explore. It concentrates on prompting with LLMs: BLOOM, OPT, GPT-3, Flan-T5, InstructDial and TNLGv2. The paper shows that the choice of datasets used for training a model contributes to how well it performs on a task as well as on how the prompt should be structured. Specifically, the more diverse and relevant the group of datasets that a model is trained on, the better dialog evaluation performs. This paper also investigates how the number of examples in the prompt and the type of example selection used affect the model's performance.

Multimodal models are becoming increasingly effective, in part due to unified components, such as the Transformer architecture. However, multimodal models still often consist of many task- and modality-specific pieces and training procedures. For example, CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) trains independent text and image towers via a contrastive loss. We explore an additional unification: the use of a pure pixel-based model to perform image, text, and multimodal tasks. Our model is trained with contrastive loss alone, so we call it CLIP-Pixels Only (CLIPPO). CLIPPO uses a single encoder that processes both regular images and text rendered as images. CLIPPO performs image-based tasks such as retrieval and zero-shot image classification almost as well as CLIP, with half the number of parameters and no text-specific tower or embedding. When trained jointly via image-text contrastive learning and next-sentence contrastive learning, CLIPPO can perform well on natural language understanding tasks, without any word-level loss (language modelling or masked language modelling), outperforming pixel-based prior work. Surprisingly, CLIPPO can obtain good accuracy in visual question answering, simply by rendering the question and image together. Finally, we exploit the fact that CLIPPO does not require a tokenizer to show that it can achieve strong performance on multilingual multimodal retrieval without

Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven pragmatic phenomena, using zero-shot prompting on an expert-curated set of English materials. We ask whether models (1) select pragmatic interpretations of speaker utterances, (2) make similar error patterns as humans, and (3) use similar linguistic cues as humans to solve the tasks. We find that the largest models achieve high accuracy and match human error patterns: within incorrect responses, models favor literal interpretations over heuristic-based distractors. We also find preliminary evidence that models and humans are sensitive to similar linguistic cues. Our results suggest that pragmatic behaviors can emerge in models without explicitly constructed representations of mental states. However, models tend to struggle with phenomena relying on social expectation violations.

Figurative language (e.g., "he flew like the wind") is challenging to understand, as it is hard to tell what implicit information is being conveyed from the surface form alone. We hypothesize that to perform this task well, the reader needs to mentally elaborate the scene being described to identify a sensible meaning of the language. We present DREAM-FLUTE, a figurative language understanding system that does this, first forming a "mental model" of situations described in a premise and hypothesis before making an entailment/contradiction decision and generating an explanation. DREAM-FLUTE uses an existing scene elaboration model, DREAM, for constructing its "mental model." In the FigLang2022 Shared Task evaluation, DREAM-FLUTE achieved (joint) first place (Acc@60=63.3%), and can perform even better with ensemble techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. More generally, this work suggests that adding a reflective component to pretrained language models can improve their performance beyond standard fine-tuning (3.3% improvement in Acc@60).

Probabilistic models of language understanding are valuable tools for investigating human language use. However, they need to be hand-designed for a particular domain. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) are trained on text that spans a wide array of domains, but they lack the structure and interpretability of probabilistic models. In this paper, we use chain-of-thought prompts to introduce structures from probabilistic models into LLMs. We explore this approach in the case of metaphor understanding. Our chain-of-thought prompts lead language models to infer latent variables and reason about their relationships in order to choose appropriate paraphrases for metaphors. The latent variables and relationships chosen are informed by theories of metaphor understanding from cognitive psychology. We apply these prompts to the two largest versions of GPT-3 and show that they can improve performance in a paraphrase selection task.

Unified vision-language frameworks have greatly advanced in recent years, most of which adopt an encoder-decoder architecture to unify image-text tasks as sequence-to-sequence generation. However, existing video-language (VidL) models still require task-specific designs in model architecture and training objectives for each task. In this work, we explore a unified VidL framework LAVENDER, where Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is used as the common interface for all pre-training and downstream tasks. Such unification leads to a simplified model architecture, where only a lightweight MLM head, instead of a decoder with much more parameters, is needed on top of the multimodal encoder. Surprisingly, experimental results show that this unified framework achieves competitive performance on 14 VidL benchmarks, covering video question answering, text-to-video retrieval and video captioning. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the advantage of LAVENDER over existing VidL methods in: (i) supporting all downstream tasks with just a single set of parameter values when multi-task finetuned; (ii) few-shot generalization on various downstream tasks; and (iii) enabling zero-shot evaluation on video question answering tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LAVENDER.

Transformers, currently the state-of-the-art in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, are prone to generate uncalibrated predictions or extreme probabilities, making the process of taking different decisions based on their output relatively difficult. In this paper we propose to build several inductive Venn--ABERS predictors (IVAP), which are guaranteed to be well calibrated under minimal assumptions, based on a selection of pre-trained transformers. We test their performance over a set of diverse NLU tasks and show that they are capable of producing well-calibrated probabilistic predictions that are uniformly spread over the [0,1] interval -- all while retaining the original model's predictive accuracy.

Human brains integrate linguistic and perceptual information simultaneously to understand natural language, and hold the critical ability to render imaginations. Such abilities enable us to construct new abstract concepts or concrete objects, and are essential in involving practical knowledge to solve problems in low-resource scenarios. However, most existing methods for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) are mainly focused on textual signals. They do not simulate human visual imagination ability, which hinders models from inferring and learning efficiently from limited data samples. Therefore, we introduce an Imagination-Augmented Cross-modal Encoder (iACE) to solve natural language understanding tasks from a novel learning perspective -- imagination-augmented cross-modal understanding. iACE enables visual imagination with external knowledge transferred from the powerful generative and pre-trained vision-and-language models. Extensive experiments on GLUE and SWAG show that iACE achieves consistent improvement over visually-supervised pre-trained models. More importantly, results in extreme and normal few-shot settings validate the effectiveness of iACE in low-resource natural language understanding circumstances.

The paper describes the open Russian medical language understanding benchmark covering several task types (classification, question answering, natural language inference, named entity recognition) on a number of novel text sets. Given the sensitive nature of the data in healthcare, such a benchmark partially closes the problem of Russian medical dataset absence. We prepare the unified format labeling, data split, and evaluation metrics for new tasks. The remaining tasks are from existing datasets with a few modifications. A single-number metric expresses a model's ability to cope with the benchmark. Moreover, we implement several baseline models, from simple ones to neural networks with transformer architecture, and release the code. Expectedly, the more advanced models yield better performance, but even a simple model is enough for a decent result in some tasks. Furthermore, for all tasks, we provide a human evaluation. Interestingly the models outperform humans in the large-scale classification tasks. However, the advantage of natural intelligence remains in the tasks requiring more knowledge and reasoning.

Current researches on spoken language understanding (SLU) heavily are limited to a simple setting: the plain text-based SLU that takes the user utterance as input and generates its corresponding semantic frames (e.g., intent and slots). Unfortunately, such a simple setting may fail to work in complex real-world scenarios when an utterance is semantically ambiguous, which cannot be achieved by the text-based SLU models. In this paper, we first introduce a new and important task, Profile-based Spoken Language Understanding (ProSLU), which requires the model that not only relies on the plain text but also the supporting profile information to predict the correct intents and slots. To this end, we further introduce a large-scale human-annotated Chinese dataset with over 5K utterances and their corresponding supporting profile information (Knowledge Graph (KG), User Profile (UP), Context Awareness (CA)). In addition, we evaluate several state-of-the-art baseline models and explore a multi-level knowledge adapter to effectively incorporate profile information. Experimental results reveal that all existing text-based SLU models fail to work when the utterances are semantically ambiguous and our proposed framework can effectively fuse the supporting information for sentence-level intent detection and token-level slot filling. Finally, we summarize key challenges and provide new points for future directions, which hopes to facilitate the research.

As Automatic Speech Processing (ASR) systems are getting better, there is an increasing interest of using the ASR output to do downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, there are few open source toolkits that can be used to generate reproducible results on different Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) benchmarks. Hence, there is a need to build an open source standard that can be used to have a faster start into SLU research. We present ESPnet-SLU, which is designed for quick development of spoken language understanding in a single framework. ESPnet-SLU is a project inside end-to-end speech processing toolkit, ESPnet, which is a widely used open-source standard for various speech processing tasks like ASR, Text to Speech (TTS) and Speech Translation (ST). We enhance the toolkit to provide implementations for various SLU benchmarks that enable researchers to seamlessly mix-and-match different ASR and NLU models. We also provide pretrained models with intensively tuned hyper-parameters that can match or even outperform the current state-of-the-art performances. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet.

Since visual perception can give rich information beyond text descriptions for world understanding, there has been increasing interest in leveraging visual grounding for language learning. Recently, vokenization (Tan and Bansal, 2020) has attracted attention by using the predictions of a text-to-image retrieval model as labels for language model supervision. Despite its success, the method suffers from approximation error of using finite image labels and the lack of vocabulary diversity of a small image-text dataset. To overcome these limitations, we present VidLanKD, a video-language knowledge distillation method for improving language understanding. We train a multi-modal teacher model on a video-text dataset, and then transfer its knowledge to a student language model with a text dataset. To avoid approximation error, we propose to use different knowledge distillation objectives. In addition, the use of a large-scale video-text dataset helps learn diverse and richer vocabularies. In our experiments, VidLanKD achieves consistent improvements over text-only language models and vokenization models, on several downstream language understanding tasks including GLUE, SQuAD, and SWAG. We also demonstrate the improved world knowledge, physical reasoning, and temporal reasoning capabilities of our model by evaluating on the GLUE-diagnostics, PIQA, and TRACIE datasets. Lastly, we present comprehensive ablation studies as well as visualizations of the learned text-to-video grounding results of our teacher and student language models. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/zinengtang/VidLanKD

Statutory reasoning is the task of determining whether a legal statute, stated in natural language, applies to the text description of a case. Prior work introduced a resource that approached statutory reasoning as a monolithic textual entailment problem, with neural baselines performing nearly at-chance. To address this challenge, we decompose statutory reasoning into four types of language-understanding challenge problems, through the introduction of concepts and structure found in Prolog programs. Augmenting an existing benchmark, we provide annotations for the four tasks, and baselines for three of them. Models for statutory reasoning are shown to benefit from the additional structure, improving on prior baselines. Further, the decomposition into subtasks facilitates finer-grained model diagnostics and clearer incremental progress.

We introduce the Probabilistic Worldbuilding Model (PWM), a new fully-symbolic Bayesian model of semantic parsing and reasoning, as a first step in a research program toward more domain- and task-general NLU and AI. Humans create internal mental models of their observations which greatly aid in their ability to understand and reason about a large variety of problems. In PWM, the meanings of sentences, acquired facts about the world, and intermediate steps in reasoning are all expressed in a human-readable formal language, with the design goal of interpretability. PWM is Bayesian, designed specifically to be able to generalize to new domains and new tasks. We derive and implement an inference algorithm that reads sentences by parsing and abducing updates to its latent world model that capture the semantics of those sentences, and evaluate it on two out-of-domain question-answering datasets: (1) ProofWriter and (2) a new dataset we call FictionalGeoQA, designed to be more representative of real language but still simple enough to focus on evaluating reasoning ability, while being robust against heuristics. Our method outperforms baselines on both, thereby demonstrating its value as a proof-of-concept.

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this rich language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of high-level tasks -- Reading Comprehension, Textual Entailment, etc. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5k new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Besides, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multi-lingual pre-trained language-models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.

In this paper, we introduce an advanced Russian general language understanding evaluation benchmark -- RussianGLUE. Recent advances in the field of universal language models and transformers require the development of a methodology for their broad diagnostics and testing for general intellectual skills - detection of natural language inference, commonsense reasoning, ability to perform simple logical operations regardless of text subject or lexicon. For the first time, a benchmark of nine tasks, collected and organized analogically to the SuperGLUE methodology, was developed from scratch for the Russian language. We provide baselines, human level evaluation, an open-source framework for evaluating models (https://github.com/RussianNLP/RussianSuperGLUE), and an overall leaderboard of transformer models for the Russian language. Besides, we present the first results of comparing multilingual models in the adapted diagnostic test set and offer the first steps to further expanding or assessing state-of-the-art models independently of language.

End-to-end Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are made increasingly large and complex to achieve the state-ofthe-art accuracy. However, the increased complexity of a model can also introduce high risk of over-fitting, which is a major challenge in SLU tasks due to the limitation of available data. In this paper, we propose an attention-based SLU model together with three encoder enhancement strategies to overcome data sparsity challenge. The first strategy focuses on the transferlearning approach to improve feature extraction capability of the encoder. It is implemented by pre-training the encoder component with a quantity of Automatic Speech Recognition annotated data relying on the standard Transformer architecture and then fine-tuning the SLU model with a small amount of target labelled data. The second strategy adopts multitask learning strategy, the SLU model integrates the speech recognition model by sharing the same underlying encoder, such that improving robustness and generalization ability. The third strategy, learning from Component Fusion (CF) idea, involves a Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) model and aims to boost the capability of the decoder with an auxiliary network. It hence reduces the risk of over-fitting and augments the ability of the underlying encoder, indirectly. Experiments on the FluentAI dataset show that cross-language transfer learning and multi-task strategies have been improved by up to 4:52% and 3:89% respectively, compared to the baseline.

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incorporate explicit contextual semantics from pre-trained semantic role labeling, and introduce an improved language representation model, Semantics-aware BERT (SemBERT), which is capable of explicitly absorbing contextual semantics over a BERT backbone. SemBERT keeps the convenient usability of its BERT precursor in a light fine-tuning way without substantial task-specific modifications. Compared with BERT, semantics-aware BERT is as simple in concept but more powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art or substantially improves results on ten reading comprehension and language inference tasks.

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these end-to-end models without a large amount of training data is difficult. We propose a method to reduce the data requirements of end-to-end SLU in which the model is first pre-trained to predict words and phonemes, thus learning good features for SLU. We introduce a new SLU dataset, Fluent Speech Commands, and show that our method improves performance both when the full dataset is used for training and when only a small subset is used. We also describe preliminary experiments to gauge the model's ability to generalize to new phrases not heard during training.

We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible to the lay developer. In this paper, we present the first wide coverage evaluation and comparison of some of the most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 domains) dataset of 25K user utterances that we have collected and annotated with Intent and Entity Type specifications and which will be released as part of this submission. The results show that on Intent classification Watson significantly outperforms the other platforms, namely, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa; though these also perform well. Interestingly, on Entity Type recognition, Watson performs significantly worse due to its low Precision. Again, Dialogflow, LUIS and Rasa perform well on this task.

For a large portion of real-life utterances, the intention cannot be solely decided by either their semantic or syntactic characteristics. Although not all the sociolinguistic and pragmatic information can be digitized, at least phonetic features are indispensable in understanding the spoken language. Especially in head-final languages such as Korean, sentence-final prosody has great importance in identifying the speaker's intention. This paper suggests a system which identifies the inherent intention of a spoken utterance given its transcript, in some cases using auxiliary acoustic features. The main point here is a separate distinction for cases where discrimination of intention requires an acoustic cue. Thus, the proposed classification system decides whether the given utterance is a fragment, statement, question, command, or a rhetorical question/command, utilizing the intonation-dependency coming from the head-finality. Based on an intuitive understanding of the Korean language that is engaged in the data annotation, we construct a network which identifies the intention of a speech, and validate its utility with the test sentences. The system, if combined with up-to-date speech recognizers, is expected to be flexibly inserted into various language understanding modules.

We propose DuoRC, a novel dataset for Reading Comprehension (RC) that motivates several new challenges for neural approaches in language understanding beyond those offered by existing RC datasets. DuoRC contains 186,089 unique question-answer pairs created from a collection of 7680 pairs of movie plots where each pair in the collection reflects two versions of the same movie - one from Wikipedia and the other from IMDb - written by two different authors. We asked crowdsourced workers to create questions from one version of the plot and a different set of workers to extract or synthesize answers from the other version. This unique characteristic of DuoRC where questions and answers are created from different versions of a document narrating the same underlying story, ensures by design, that there is very little lexical overlap between the questions created from one version and the segments containing the answer in the other version. Further, since the two versions have different levels of plot detail, narration style, vocabulary, etc., answering questions from the second version requires deeper language understanding and incorporating external background knowledge. Additionally, the narrative style of passages arising from movie plots (as opposed to typical descriptive passages in existing datasets) exhibits the need to perform complex reasoning over events across multiple sentences. Indeed, we observe that state-of-the-art neural RC models which have achieved near human performance on the SQuAD dataset, even when coupled with traditional NLP techniques to address the challenges presented in DuoRC exhibit very poor performance (F1 score of 37.42% on DuoRC v/s 86% on SQuAD dataset). This opens up several interesting research avenues wherein DuoRC could complement other RC datasets to explore novel neural approaches for studying language understanding.

A 3D scene graph represents a compact scene model, storing information about the objects and the semantic relationships between them, making its use promising for robotic tasks. When interacting with a user, an embodied intelligent agent should be capable of responding to various queries about the scene formulated in natural language. Large Language Models (LLMs) are beneficial solutions for user-robot interaction due to their natural language understanding and reasoning abilities. Recent methods for creating learnable representations of 3D scenes have demonstrated the potential to improve the quality of LLMs responses by adapting to the 3D world. However, the existing methods do not explicitly utilize information about the semantic relationships between objects, limiting themselves to information about their coordinates. In this work, we propose a method 3DGraphLLM for constructing a learnable representation of a 3D scene graph. The learnable representation is used as input for LLMs to perform 3D vision-language tasks. In our experiments on popular ScanRefer, RIORefer, Multi3DRefer, ScanQA, Sqa3D, and Scan2cap datasets, we demonstrate the advantage of this approach over baseline methods that do not use information about the semantic relationships between objects. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/CognitiveAISystems/3DGraphLLM.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising progress in understanding and analyzing video content. However, processing long videos remains a significant challenge constrained by LLM's context size. To address this limitation, we propose LongVU, a spatiotemporal adaptive compression mechanism thats reduces the number of video tokens while preserving visual details of long videos. Our idea is based on leveraging cross-modal query and inter-frame dependencies to adaptively reduce temporal and spatial redundancy in videos. Specifically, we leverage DINOv2 features to remove redundant frames that exhibit high similarity. Then we utilize text-guided cross-modal query for selective frame feature reduction. Further, we perform spatial token reduction across frames based on their temporal dependencies. Our adaptive compression strategy effectively processes a large number of frames with little visual information loss within given context length. Our LongVU consistently surpass existing methods across a variety of video understanding benchmarks, especially on hour-long video understanding tasks such as VideoMME and MLVU. Given a light-weight LLM, our LongVU also scales effectively into a smaller size with state-of-the-art video understanding performance.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have excelled in 2D image-text comprehension and image generation, but their understanding of the 3D world is notably deficient, limiting progress in 3D language understanding and generation. To solve this problem, we introduce GPT4Point, an innovative groundbreaking point-language multimodal model designed specifically for unified 3D object understanding and generation within the MLLM framework. GPT4Point as a powerful 3D MLLM seamlessly can execute a variety of point-text reference tasks such as point-cloud captioning and Q&A. Additionally, GPT4Point is equipped with advanced capabilities for controllable 3D generation, it can get high-quality results through a low-quality point-text feature maintaining the geometric shapes and colors. To support the expansive needs of 3D object-text pairs, we develop Pyramid-XL, a point-language dataset annotation engine. It constructs a large-scale database over 1M objects of varied text granularity levels from the Objaverse-XL dataset, essential for training GPT4Point. A comprehensive benchmark has been proposed to evaluate 3D point-language understanding capabilities. In extensive evaluations, GPT4Point has demonstrated superior performance in understanding and generation.

With the rapid development of evaluation datasets to assess LLMs understanding across a wide range of subjects and domains, identifying a suitable language understanding benchmark has become increasingly challenging. In this work, we explore LLM evaluation challenges for low-resource language understanding and introduce ProverbEval, LLM evaluation benchmark for low-resource languages based on proverbs to focus on low-resource language understanding in culture-specific scenarios. We benchmark various LLMs and explore factors that create variability in the benchmarking process. We observed performance variances of up to 50%, depending on the order in which answer choices were presented in multiple-choice tasks. Native language proverb descriptions significantly improve tasks such as proverb generation, contributing to improved outcomes. Additionally, monolingual evaluations consistently outperformed their cross-lingual counterparts. We argue special attention must be given to the order of choices, choice of prompt language, task variability, and generation tasks when creating LLM evaluation benchmarks.

Visually-situated language is ubiquitous -- sources range from textbooks with diagrams to web pages with images and tables, to mobile apps with buttons and forms. Perhaps due to this diversity, previous work has typically relied on domain-specific recipes with limited sharing of the underlying data, model architectures, and objectives. We present Pix2Struct, a pretrained image-to-text model for purely visual language understanding, which can be finetuned on tasks containing visually-situated language. Pix2Struct is pretrained by learning to parse masked screenshots of web pages into simplified HTML. The web, with its richness of visual elements cleanly reflected in the HTML structure, provides a large source of pretraining data well suited to the diversity of downstream tasks. Intuitively, this objective subsumes common pretraining signals such as OCR, language modeling, image captioning. In addition to the novel pretraining strategy, we introduce a variable-resolution input representation and a more flexible integration of language and vision inputs, where language prompts such as questions are rendered directly on top of the input image. For the first time, we show that a single pretrained model can achieve state-of-the-art results in six out of nine tasks across four domains: documents, illustrations, user interfaces, and natural images.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance for many vision-language tasks. However, most existing pre-trained models only excel in either understanding-based tasks or generation-based tasks. Furthermore, performance improvement has been largely achieved by scaling up the dataset with noisy image-text pairs collected from the web, which is a suboptimal source of supervision. In this paper, we propose BLIP, a new VLP framework which transfers flexibly to both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. BLIP effectively utilizes the noisy web data by bootstrapping the captions, where a captioner generates synthetic captions and a filter removes the noisy ones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval (+2.7% in average recall@1), image captioning (+2.8% in CIDEr), and VQA (+1.6% in VQA score). BLIP also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to video-language tasks in a zero-shot manner. Code, models, and datasets are released at https://github.com/salesforce/BLIP.

In Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been consistent advancements in task-specific performance, largely influenced by effective prompt design. While recent research on prompting has enhanced the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, a gap remains in further improving their understanding abilities. In this study, we introduce Metacognitive Prompting (MP), a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes. Using MP, LLMs undergo a systematic series of structured, self-aware evaluations, drawing on both their vast inherent knowledge and new insights. Our experiments involve five prevalent LLMs: Llama2, Vicuna, PaLM, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, all of which span various general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks from the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. Results indicate that, although GPT-4 consistently excels in most tasks, PaLM, when equipped with MP, approaches its performance level. Furthermore, across models and datasets, MP consistently outperforms existing prompting methods, including standard and chain-of-thought prompting. This study underscores the potential to amplify the understanding abilities of LLMs and highlights the benefits of mirroring human introspective reasoning in NLU tasks.

Advances in English language representation enabled a more sample-efficient pre-training task by Efficiently Learning an Encoder that Classifies Token Replacements Accurately (ELECTRA). Which, instead of training a model to recover masked tokens, it trains a discriminator model to distinguish true input tokens from corrupted tokens that were replaced by a generator network. On the other hand, current Arabic language representation approaches rely only on pretraining via masked language modeling. In this paper, we develop an Arabic language representation model, which we name AraELECTRA. Our model is pretrained using the replaced token detection objective on large Arabic text corpora. We evaluate our model on multiple Arabic NLP tasks, including reading comprehension, sentiment analysis, and named-entity recognition and we show that AraELECTRA outperforms current state-of-the-art Arabic language representation models, given the same pretraining data and with even a smaller model size.

The Arabic language is a morphologically rich language with relatively few resources and a less explored syntax compared to English. Given these limitations, Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), and Question Answering (QA), have proven to be very challenging to tackle. Recently, with the surge of transformers based models, language-specific BERT based models have proven to be very efficient at language understanding, provided they are pre-trained on a very large corpus. Such models were able to set new standards and achieve state-of-the-art results for most NLP tasks. In this paper, we pre-trained BERT specifically for the Arabic language in the pursuit of achieving the same success that BERT did for the English language. The performance of AraBERT is compared to multilingual BERT from Google and other state-of-the-art approaches. The results showed that the newly developed AraBERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on most tested Arabic NLP tasks. The pretrained araBERT models are publicly available on https://github.com/aub-mind/arabert hoping to encourage research and applications for Arabic NLP.

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) are widely used to evaluate the commonsense, understanding, and problem-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the open-source nature of these benchmarks and the broad sources of training data for LLMs have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation results. To alleviate this issue, we propose a contamination-free and more challenging MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF. This benchmark reassesses LLMs' understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data leakage. To avoid unintentional data leakage, we source data from a broader domain and design three decontamination rules. To prevent malicious data leakage, we divide the benchmark into validation and test sets with similar difficulty and subject distributions. The test set remains closed-source to ensure reliable results, while the validation set is publicly available to promote transparency and facilitate independent verification. Our evaluation of mainstream LLMs reveals that the powerful GPT-4o achieves merely a 5-shot score of 73.4% and a 0-shot score of 71.9% on the test set, which indicates the effectiveness of our approach in creating a more rigorous and contamination-free evaluation standard. The GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/microsoft/MMLU-CF and the dataset refers to https://huggingface.co./datasets/microsoft/MMLU-CF.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource and linguistically diverse languages remains a significant challenge in NLP, particularly for languages using non-Latin scripts like those spoken in India. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on English, leaving substantial gaps in assessing LLM capabilities in these languages. We introduce MILU, a Multi task Indic Language Understanding Benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark designed to address this gap. MILU spans 8 domains and 42 subjects across 11 Indic languages, reflecting both general and culturally specific knowledge. With an India-centric design, incorporates material from regional and state-level examinations, covering topics such as local history, arts, festivals, and laws, alongside standard subjects like science and mathematics. We evaluate over 42 LLMs, and find that current LLMs struggle with MILU, with GPT-4o achieving the highest average accuracy at 72 percent. Open multilingual models outperform language-specific fine-tuned models, which perform only slightly better than random baselines. Models also perform better in high resource languages as compared to low resource ones. Domain-wise analysis indicates that models perform poorly in culturally relevant areas like Arts and Humanities, Law and Governance compared to general fields like STEM. To the best of our knowledge, MILU is the first of its kind benchmark focused on Indic languages, serving as a crucial step towards comprehensive cultural evaluation. All code, benchmarks, and artifacts will be made publicly available to foster open research.

Humans subconsciously engage in geospatial reasoning when reading articles. We recognize place names and their spatial relations in text and mentally associate them with their physical locations on Earth. Although pretrained language models can mimic this cognitive process using linguistic context, they do not utilize valuable geospatial information in large, widely available geographical databases, e.g., OpenStreetMap. This paper introduces GeoLM, a geospatially grounded language model that enhances the understanding of geo-entities in natural language. GeoLM leverages geo-entity mentions as anchors to connect linguistic information in text corpora with geospatial information extracted from geographical databases. GeoLM connects the two types of context through contrastive learning and masked language modeling. It also incorporates a spatial coordinate embedding mechanism to encode distance and direction relations to capture geospatial context. In the experiment, we demonstrate that GeoLM exhibits promising capabilities in supporting toponym recognition, toponym linking, relation extraction, and geo-entity typing, which bridge the gap between natural language processing and geospatial sciences. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/geolm.

BERT adopts masked language modeling (MLM) for pre-training and is one of the most successful pre-training models. Since BERT neglects dependency among predicted tokens, XLNet introduces permuted language modeling (PLM) for pre-training to address this problem. However, XLNet does not leverage the full position information of a sentence and thus suffers from position discrepancy between pre-training and fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose MPNet, a novel pre-training method that inherits the advantages of BERT and XLNet and avoids their limitations. MPNet leverages the dependency among predicted tokens through permuted language modeling (vs. MLM in BERT), and takes auxiliary position information as input to make the model see a full sentence and thus reducing the position discrepancy (vs. PLM in XLNet). We pre-train MPNet on a large-scale dataset (over 160GB text corpora) and fine-tune on a variety of down-streaming tasks (GLUE, SQuAD, etc). Experimental results show that MPNet outperforms MLM and PLM by a large margin, and achieves better results on these tasks compared with previous state-of-the-art pre-trained methods (e.g., BERT, XLNet, RoBERTa) under the same model setting. The code and the pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/microsoft/MPNet.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various NLP tasks, yet they still face significant challenges in reasoning and arithmetic. Temporal reasoning, a critical component of natural language understanding, has raised increasing research attention. However, comprehensive testing of Allen's interval relations (e.g., before, after, during) -- a fundamental framework for temporal relationships -- remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we present ChronoSense, a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs' temporal understanding. It includes 16 tasks, focusing on identifying the Allen relation between two temporal events and temporal arithmetic, using both abstract events and real-world data from Wikidata. We assess the performance of seven recent LLMs using this benchmark and the results indicate that models handle Allen relations, even symmetrical ones, quite differently. Moreover, the findings suggest that the models may rely on memorization to answer time-related questions. Overall, the models' low performance highlights the need for improved temporal understanding in LLMs and ChronoSense offers a robust framework for future research in this area. Our dataset and the source code are available at https://github.com/duyguislakoglu/chronosense.

Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of languages. However, efficacy can differ greatly between different language families, especially for those with limited linguistic resources. This report presents MERaLiON-TextLLM, a series of open-source language models specifically tailored to improve understanding and generation in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish. The initial released model is built on Llama-3-8B-Base and refined through a meticulously crafted process of continued pre-training and weight merging. Our approach achieves performance improvements across benchmarks in these languages, exceeding the capabilities of the official Llama-3 models. We provide the model checkpoints as a resource to support further research and development in cross-lingual language understanding.

Vision-language tasks, such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR are challenging because they require the model's reasoning ability to understand the semantics of the visual world and natural language. Supervised methods working for vision-language tasks have been well-studied. However, solving these tasks in a zero-shot setting is less explored. Since Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown remarkable zero-shot performance on image-text matching, previous works utilized its strong zero-shot ability by converting vision-language tasks into an image-text matching problem, and they mainly consider global-level matching (e.g., the whole image or sentence). However, we find visual and textual fine-grained information, e.g., keywords in the sentence and objects in the image, can be fairly informative for semantics understanding. Inspired by this, we propose a unified framework to take advantage of the fine-grained information for zero-shot vision-language learning, covering multiple tasks such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR. Our experiments show that our framework outperforms former zero-shot methods on VQA and achieves substantial improvement on SNLI-VE and VCR. Furthermore, our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method. Code will be available at https://github.com/ThreeSR/UniFine

Even as pre-trained language models share a semantic encoder, natural language understanding suffers from a diversity of output schemas. In this paper, we propose UBERT, a unified bidirectional language understanding model based on BERT framework, which can universally model the training objects of different NLU tasks through a biaffine network. Specifically, UBERT encodes prior knowledge from various aspects, uniformly constructing learning representations across multiple NLU tasks, which is conducive to enhancing the ability to capture common semantic understanding. By using the biaffine to model scores pair of the start and end position of the original text, various classification and extraction structures can be converted into a universal, span-decoding approach. Experiments show that UBERT wins the first price in the 2022 AIWIN - World Artificial Intelligence Innovation Competition, Chinese insurance few-shot multi-task track, and realizes the unification of extensive information extraction and linguistic reasoning tasks.

What makes a video task uniquely suited for videos, beyond what can be understood from a single image? Building on recent progress in self-supervised image-language models, we revisit this question in the context of video and language tasks. We propose the atemporal probe (ATP), a new model for video-language analysis which provides a stronger bound on the baseline accuracy of multimodal models constrained by image-level understanding. By applying this model to standard discriminative video and language tasks, such as video question answering and text-to-video retrieval, we characterize the limitations and potential of current video-language benchmarks. We find that understanding of event temporality is often not necessary to achieve strong or state-of-the-art performance, even compared with recent large-scale video-language models and in contexts intended to benchmark deeper video-level understanding. We also demonstrate how ATP can improve both video-language dataset and model design. We describe a technique for leveraging ATP to better disentangle dataset subsets with a higher concentration of temporally challenging data, improving benchmarking efficacy for causal and temporal understanding. Further, we show that effectively integrating ATP into full video-level temporal models can improve efficiency and state-of-the-art accuracy.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks: Unidirectional PLMs (e.g., GPT) are well known for their superior text generation capabilities; bidirectional PLMs (e.g., BERT) have been the prominent choice for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While both types of models have achieved promising few-shot learning performance, their potential for zero-shot learning has been underexplored. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses both types of PLMs for fully zero-shot learning of NLU tasks without requiring any task-specific data: A unidirectional PLM generates class-conditioned texts guided by prompts, which are used as the training data for fine-tuning a bidirectional PLM. With quality training data selected based on the generation probability and regularization techniques (label smoothing and temporal ensembling) applied to the fine-tuning stage for better generalization and stability, our approach demonstrates strong performance across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark (e.g., 72.3/73.8 on MNLI-m/mm and 92.8 on SST-2), significantly outperforming zero-shot prompting methods and achieving even comparable results to strong few-shot approaches using 32 training samples per class.

In this work, we introduce BanglaBERT, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model pretrained in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the NLP literature. To pretrain BanglaBERT, we collect 27.5 GB of Bangla pretraining data (dubbed `Bangla2B+') by crawling 110 popular Bangla sites. We introduce two downstream task datasets on natural language inference and question answering and benchmark on four diverse NLU tasks covering text classification, sequence labeling, and span prediction. In the process, we bring them under the first-ever Bangla Language Understanding Benchmark (BLUB). BanglaBERT achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming multilingual and monolingual models. We are making the models, datasets, and a leaderboard publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglabert to advance Bangla NLP.

Natural language inference (NLI) and semantic textual similarity (STS) are key tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). Although several benchmark datasets for those tasks have been released in English and a few other languages, there are no publicly available NLI or STS datasets in the Korean language. Motivated by this, we construct and release new datasets for Korean NLI and STS, dubbed KorNLI and KorSTS, respectively. Following previous approaches, we machine-translate existing English training sets and manually translate development and test sets into Korean. To accelerate research on Korean NLU, we also establish baselines on KorNLI and KorSTS. Our datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/KorNLUDatasets.

Employing pre-trained language models (LM) to extract contextualized word representations has achieved state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. However, applying this technique to noisy transcripts generated by automatic speech recognizer (ASR) is concerned. Therefore, this paper focuses on making contextualized representations more ASR-robust. We propose a novel confusion-aware fine-tuning method to mitigate the impact of ASR errors to pre-trained LMs. Specifically, we fine-tune LMs to produce similar representations for acoustically confusable words that are obtained from word confusion networks (WCNs) produced by ASR. Experiments on the benchmark ATIS dataset show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of spoken language understanding when performing on ASR transcripts. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/SpokenVec

The pre-trained language models have achieved great successes in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks due to its capacity to capture the deep contextualized information in text by pre-training on large-scale corpora. In this technical report, we present our practice of pre-training language models named NEZHA (NEural contextualiZed representation for CHinese lAnguage understanding) on Chinese corpora and finetuning for the Chinese NLU tasks. The current version of NEZHA is based on BERT with a collection of proven improvements, which include Functional Relative Positional Encoding as an effective positional encoding scheme, Whole Word Masking strategy, Mixed Precision Training and the LAMB Optimizer in training the models. The experimental results show that NEZHA achieves the state-of-the-art performances when finetuned on several representative Chinese tasks, including named entity recognition (People's Daily NER), sentence matching (LCQMC), Chinese sentiment classification (ChnSenti) and natural language inference (XNLI).

We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5% (7.7% point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).

In the last year, new models and methods for pretraining and transfer learning have driven striking performance improvements across a range of language understanding tasks. The GLUE benchmark, introduced a little over one year ago, offers a single-number metric that summarizes progress on a diverse set of such tasks, but performance on the benchmark has recently surpassed the level of non-expert humans, suggesting limited headroom for further research. In this paper we present SuperGLUE, a new benchmark styled after GLUE with a new set of more difficult language understanding tasks, a software toolkit, and a public leaderboard. SuperGLUE is available at super.gluebenchmark.com.

We present GLIPv2, a grounded VL understanding model, that serves both localization tasks (e.g., object detection, instance segmentation) and Vision-Language (VL) understanding tasks (e.g., VQA, image captioning). GLIPv2 elegantly unifies localization pre-training and Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) with three pre-training tasks: phrase grounding as a VL reformulation of the detection task, region-word contrastive learning as a novel region-word level contrastive learning task, and the masked language modeling. This unification not only simplifies the previous multi-stage VLP procedure but also achieves mutual benefits between localization and understanding tasks. Experimental results show that a single GLIPv2 model (all model weights are shared) achieves near SoTA performance on various localization and understanding tasks. The model also shows (1) strong zero-shot and few-shot adaption performance on open-vocabulary object detection tasks and (2) superior grounding capability on VL understanding tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/GLIP.

In recent years, a series of Transformer-based models unlocked major improvements in general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Such a fast pace of research would not be possible without general NLU benchmarks, which allow for a fair comparison of the proposed methods. However, such benchmarks are available only for a handful of languages. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a comprehensive multi-task benchmark for the Polish language understanding, accompanied by an online leaderboard. It consists of a diverse set of tasks, adopted from existing datasets for named entity recognition, question-answering, textual entailment, and others. We also introduce a new sentiment analysis task for the e-commerce domain, named Allegro Reviews (AR). To ensure a common evaluation scheme and promote models that generalize to different NLU tasks, the benchmark includes datasets from varying domains and applications. Additionally, we release HerBERT, a Transformer-based model trained specifically for the Polish language, which has the best average performance and obtains the best results for three out of nine tasks. Finally, we provide an extensive evaluation, including several standard baselines and recently proposed, multilingual Transformer-based models.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot learning have shown promise for a scope of research and practical purposes. However, this fast-growing area lacks standardized evaluation suites for non-English languages, hindering progress outside the Anglo-centric paradigm. To address this line of research, we propose TAPE (Text Attack and Perturbation Evaluation), a novel benchmark that includes six more complex NLU tasks for Russian, covering multi-hop reasoning, ethical concepts, logic and commonsense knowledge. The TAPE's design focuses on systematic zero-shot and few-shot NLU evaluation: (i) linguistic-oriented adversarial attacks and perturbations for analyzing robustness, and (ii) subpopulations for nuanced interpretation. The detailed analysis of testing the autoregressive baselines indicates that simple spelling-based perturbations affect the performance the most, while paraphrasing the input has a more negligible effect. At the same time, the results demonstrate a significant gap between the neural and human baselines for most tasks. We publicly release TAPE (tape-benchmark.com) to foster research on robust LMs that can generalize to new tasks when little to no supervision is available.

We propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learners that is format agnostic, i.e., it is compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks, such as text classification, commonsense reasoning, coreference resolution, and sentiment analysis. Zero-shot learning aims to train a model on a given task such that it can address new learning tasks without any additional training. Our approach converts zero-shot learning into multiple-choice tasks, avoiding problems in commonly used large-scale generative models such as FLAN. It not only adds generalization ability to models but also significantly reduces the number of parameters. Our method shares the merits of efficient training and deployment. Our approach shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as natural language inference and text classification. Our model achieves this success with only 235M parameters, which is substantially smaller than state-of-the-art models with billions of parameters. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-CCNL/Fengshenbang-LM .

We present the MASSIVE dataset--Multilingual Amazon Slu resource package (SLURP) for Slot-filling, Intent classification, and Virtual assistant Evaluation. MASSIVE contains 1M realistic, parallel, labeled virtual assistant utterances spanning 51 languages, 18 domains, 60 intents, and 55 slots. MASSIVE was created by tasking professional translators to localize the English-only SLURP dataset into 50 typologically diverse languages from 29 genera. We also present modeling results on XLM-R and mT5, including exact match accuracy, intent classification accuracy, and slot-filling F1 score. We have released our dataset, modeling code, and models publicly.

Pre-trained language models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. GPT-3 has shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can further exploit their enormous potential. A unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 was recently proposed for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models and trained a model with 10 billion parameters. ERNIE 3.0 outperformed the state-of-the-art models on various NLP tasks. In order to explore the performance of scaling up ERNIE 3.0, we train a hundred-billion-parameter model called ERNIE 3.0 Titan with up to 260 billion parameters on the PaddlePaddle platform. Furthermore, we design a self-supervised adversarial loss and a controllable language modeling loss to make ERNIE 3.0 Titan generate credible and controllable texts. To reduce the computation overhead and carbon emission, we propose an online distillation framework for ERNIE 3.0 Titan, where the teacher model will teach students and train itself simultaneously. ERNIE 3.0 Titan is the largest Chinese dense pre-trained model so far. Empirical results show that the ERNIE 3.0 Titan outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 68 NLP datasets.

Progress in speech processing has been facilitated by shared datasets and benchmarks. Historically these have focused on automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, or other lower-level tasks. Interest has been growing in higher-level spoken language understanding tasks, including using end-to-end models, but there are fewer annotated datasets for such tasks. At the same time, recent work shows the possibility of pre-training generic representations and then fine-tuning for several tasks using relatively little labeled data. We propose to create a suite of benchmark tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) consisting of limited-size labeled training sets and corresponding evaluation sets. This resource would allow the research community to track progress, evaluate pre-trained representations for higher-level tasks, and study open questions such as the utility of pipeline versus end-to-end approaches. We present the first phase of the SLUE benchmark suite, consisting of named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and ASR on the corresponding datasets. We focus on naturally produced (not read or synthesized) speech, and freely available datasets. We provide new transcriptions and annotations on subsets of the VoxCeleb and VoxPopuli datasets, evaluation metrics and results for baseline models, and an open-source toolkit to reproduce the baselines and evaluate new models.

Pretrained multilingual models are able to perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting, even for languages unseen during pretraining. However, prior work evaluating performance on unseen languages has largely been limited to low-level, syntactic tasks, and it remains unclear if zero-shot learning of high-level, semantic tasks is possible for unseen languages. To explore this question, we present AmericasNLI, an extension of XNLI (Conneau et al., 2018) to 10 indigenous languages of the Americas. We conduct experiments with XLM-R, testing multiple zero-shot and translation-based approaches. Additionally, we explore model adaptation via continued pretraining and provide an analysis of the dataset by considering hypothesis-only models. We find that XLM-R's zero-shot performance is poor for all 10 languages, with an average performance of 38.62%. Continued pretraining offers improvements, with an average accuracy of 44.05%. Surprisingly, training on poorly translated data by far outperforms all other methods with an accuracy of 48.72%.

This paper introduces Timers and Such, a new open source dataset of spoken English commands for common voice control use cases involving numbers. We describe the gap in existing spoken language understanding datasets that Timers and Such fills, the design and creation of the dataset, and experiments with a number of ASR-based and end-to-end baseline models, the code for which has been made available as part of the SpeechBrain toolkit.

Large-scale cross-lingual language models (LM), such as mBERT, Unicoder and XLM, have achieved great success in cross-lingual representation learning. However, when applied to zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks, most existing methods use only single-language input for LM finetuning, without leveraging the intrinsic cross-lingual alignment between different languages that proves essential for multilingual tasks. In this paper, we propose FILTER, an enhanced fusion method that takes cross-lingual data as input for XLM finetuning. Specifically, FILTER first encodes text input in the source language and its translation in the target language independently in the shallow layers, then performs cross-language fusion to extract multilingual knowledge in the intermediate layers, and finally performs further language-specific encoding. During inference, the model makes predictions based on the text input in the target language and its translation in the source language. For simple tasks such as classification, translated text in the target language shares the same label as the source language. However, this shared label becomes less accurate or even unavailable for more complex tasks such as question answering, NER and POS tagging. To tackle this issue, we further propose an additional KL-divergence self-teaching loss for model training, based on auto-generated soft pseudo-labels for translated text in the target language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FILTER achieves new state of the art on two challenging multilingual multi-task benchmarks, XTREME and XGLUE.

The surge of pre-trained language models has begun a new era in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by allowing us to build powerful language models. Among these models, Transformer-based models such as BERT have become increasingly popular due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, these models are usually focused on English, leaving other languages to multilingual models with limited resources. This paper proposes a monolingual BERT for the Persian language (ParsBERT), which shows its state-of-the-art performance compared to other architectures and multilingual models. Also, since the amount of data available for NLP tasks in Persian is very restricted, a massive dataset for different NLP tasks as well as pre-training the model is composed. ParsBERT obtains higher scores in all datasets, including existing ones as well as composed ones and improves the state-of-the-art performance by outperforming both multilingual BERT and other prior works in Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification and Named Entity Recognition tasks.

We introduce a new large-scale NLI benchmark dataset, collected via an iterative, adversarial human-and-model-in-the-loop procedure. We show that training models on this new dataset leads to state-of-the-art performance on a variety of popular NLI benchmarks, while posing a more difficult challenge with its new test set. Our analysis sheds light on the shortcomings of current state-of-the-art models, and shows that non-expert annotators are successful at finding their weaknesses. The data collection method can be applied in a never-ending learning scenario, becoming a moving target for NLU, rather than a static benchmark that will quickly saturate.

Recently, the pre-trained language model, BERT (and its robustly optimized version RoBERTa), has attracted a lot of attention in natural language understanding (NLU), and achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in various NLU tasks, such as sentiment classification, natural language inference, semantic textual similarity and question answering. Inspired by the linearization exploration work of Elman [8], we extend BERT to a new model, StructBERT, by incorporating language structures into pre-training. Specifically, we pre-train StructBERT with two auxiliary tasks to make the most of the sequential order of words and sentences, which leverage language structures at the word and sentence levels, respectively. As a result, the new model is adapted to different levels of language understanding required by downstream tasks. The StructBERT with structural pre-training gives surprisingly good empirical results on a variety of downstream tasks, including pushing the state-of-the-art on the GLUE benchmark to 89.0 (outperforming all published models), the F1 score on SQuAD v1.1 question answering to 93.0, the accuracy on SNLI to 91.7.

With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, under comparable experiment settings, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.

In this paper, we introduce How2, a multimodal collection of instructional videos with English subtitles and crowdsourced Portuguese translations. We also present integrated sequence-to-sequence baselines for machine translation, automatic speech recognition, spoken language translation, and multimodal summarization. By making available data and code for several multimodal natural language tasks, we hope to stimulate more research on these and similar challenges, to obtain a deeper understanding of multimodality in language processing.

This paper presents the machine learning architecture of the Snips Voice Platform, a software solution to perform Spoken Language Understanding on microprocessors typical of IoT devices. The embedded inference is fast and accurate while enforcing privacy by design, as no personal user data is ever collected. Focusing on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding, we detail our approach to training high-performance Machine Learning models that are small enough to run in real-time on small devices. Additionally, we describe a data generation procedure that provides sufficient, high-quality training data without compromising user privacy.