Papers by Adam Roberts
How Much Knowledge Can You Pack Into the Parameters of a Language Model? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we show that large neural language models trained on unstructured text can attain competitive results on open-domain question answering benchmarks without access to external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune pre-trained neural language models to answer questions without external knowledge . they show that this approach scales with model size and performs competitively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach scales with model size and performs competitively with open-domain systems that explicitly retrieve answers from an external knowledge source when answering questions. |
Do Transformer Modifications Transfer Across Implementations and Applications? (2021.emnlp-main)
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Sharan Narang, Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Liam Fedus, Thibault Fevry, Michael Matena, Karishma Malkan, Noah Fiedel, Noam Shazeer, Zhenzhong Lan, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Nan Ding, Jake Marcus, Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel
| Challenge: | Currently, the Transformer is the de facto architecture of choice for processing sequential data. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the Transformer architecture and its modifications in a shared experimental setting . they conjecture that performance improvements may strongly depend on implementation details . |
| Outcome: | The proposed improvements do not significantly improve performance, the authors find . the proposed improvements are either developed in the same codebase or are minor changes . |
A Pretrainer’s Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity (2024.naacl-long)
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Shayne Longpre, Gregory Yauney, Emily Reif, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Barret Zoph, Denny Zhou, Jason Wei, Kevin Robinson, David Mimno, Daphne Ippolito
| Challenge: | a large number of pretraining data design practices are under-documented, authors say . authors: strong performance of modern language models depends on selfsupervised pretraining . |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain models on data curated at different collection times . they find temporal shift between evaluation data and pretraining data leads to performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The results validate, quantify, and expose many undocumented intuitions about text pretraining . authors say this practice has outperformed other models in the field . |
Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning (2023.acl-long)
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Niklas Muennighoff, Thomas Wang, Lintang Sutawika, Adam Roberts, Stella Biderman, Teven Le Scao, M Saiful Bari, Sheng Shen, Zheng Xin Yong, Hailey Schoelkopf, Xiangru Tang, Dragomir Radev, Alham Fikri Aji, Khalid Almubarak, Samuel Albanie, Zaid Alyafeai, Albert Webson, Edward Raff, Colin Raffel
| Challenge: | Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. |
| Approach: | They apply multitask prompted finetuning to pretrained multilingual models and generate variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to non-English languages that have never been seen before. |
Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering (2023.acl-long)
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Rosanne Liu, Dan Garrette, Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, Adam Roberts, Sharan Narang, Irina Blok, Rj Mical, Mohammad Norouzi, Noah Constant
| Challenge: | Current image generation models struggle to produce well-formed visual text due to lack of character-level input features. |
| Approach: | They conduct a series of experiments to compare character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders to determine their spelling ability. |
| Outcome: | The character-aware models outperform character-blind models on a range of novel text rendering tasks. |
ByT5: Towards a Token-Free Future with Pre-trained Byte-to-Byte Models (2022.tacl-1)
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Linting Xue, Aditya Barua, Noah Constant, Rami Al-Rfou, Sharan Narang, Mihir Kale, Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel
| Challenge: | a number of pre-trained language models use sequences of tokens corresponding to word units . token-free models that operate directly on raw text have many advantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a standard Transformer architecture that can be used to process byte sequences . they also characterize trade-offs in terms of parameter count, training FLOPs, and inference speed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust to noise and more robust on spelling and pronunciation tasks. |
mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer (2021.naacl-main)
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Linting Xue, Noah Constant, Adam Roberts, Mihir Kale, Rami Al-Rfou, Aditya Siddhant, Aditya Barua, Colin Raffel
| Challenge: | Current natural language processing pipelines often use transfer learning, where a model is pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on . this significantly limits their use given that roughly 80% of the world population does not speak English. |
| Approach: | They introduce a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multilingual benchmarks and a simple technique to prevent accidental translation in the zero-shot setting. |