Papers by Yi Tay
Attentive Gated Lexicon Reader with Contrastive Contextual Co-Attention for Sentiment Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentiment lexicons do not handle word sense and the concept of semantic compositionality is non-existent in simple lexiconic approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a lexicon-driven contextual attention mechanism and a contrastive co-attention mechanism that models contrasting polarities between all positive and negative words in a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms many other neural baselines on sentiment classification tasks on multiple benchmark datasets. |
Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jerry Wei, Le Hou, Andrew Lampinen, Xiangning Chen, Da Huang, Yi Tay, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, Quoc Le
| Challenge: | Language models are sensitive to the way that prompts are given, indicating that they are not reasoning in a robust manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels are replaced with arbitrary symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is much stronger at reasoning tasks and more robust to underspecified prompts than the standard model. |
Robust Representation Learning of Biomedical Names (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Biomedical concepts are often mentioned in medical documents under different name variations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning robust representations of biomedical names and terms . they encode contextual meaning, conceptual meaning, and similarity between synonyms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on retrieval, similarity and relatedness benchmarks. |
Multi-Granular Sequence Encoding via Dilated Compositional Units for Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sequence encoders are crucial components in many neural architectures for learning to read and comprehend. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional encoder that explicitly models across multiple granularities using a new dilated composition mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder is fast and expressive, and can model across multiple granularities. |
Simple and Effective Curriculum Pointer-Generator Networks for Reading Comprehension over Long Narratives (P19-1)
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Yi Tay, Shuohang Wang, Anh Tuan Luu, Jie Fu, Minh C. Phan, Xingdi Yuan, Jinfeng Rao, Siu Cheung Hui, Aston Zhang
| Challenge: | Using a pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, we propose a framework for learning over long narratives where documents easily span over thousands of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning (CL) based pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, enabling diverse training of the neural model based on the notion of alternating contextual difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the NarrativeQA reading comprehension benchmark and reaches state-of-the-art performance. |
Confusionset-guided Pointer Networks for Chinese Spelling Check (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect and fix errors in Chinese are limited due to context. |
| Approach: | They propose a Confusionset-guided pointer network for Chinese Spell Check task . they propose to use off-the-shelf confusionset to guide character generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all competitor models on three human-annotated datasets. |
Bridging the Gap between Relevance Matching and Semantic Matching for Short Text Similarity Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for relevance and semantic matching cannot be easily adapted to the other. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | Existing studies on the scaling properties of model architectures have not explored the impact of inductive biases on scaling behaviour. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive experiments to understand scaling behaviour of ten different model architectures. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the best performing model can fluctuate at different scales. |
StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that induce grammar structures from data focus on constituency or dependency structures alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can induce dependency and constituency structure at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can induce both constituency and dependency structures at the same time. |
DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents (2023.emnlp-main)
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Sanket Mehta, Jai Gupta, Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Vinh Tran, Jinfeng Rao, Marc Najork, Emma Strubell, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | Differentiable Search Indices (DSIs) encode a corpus of documents and use the same model to map queries directly to relevant document identifiers. |
| Approach: | They propose a continual learning challenge for Differentiable Search Indices (DSIs) they propose to continuously index new documents while answering queries related to previously and newly indexed documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model stably memorizes more documents and improves the average Hits@10 by +21.1% over baselines. |
Reasoning with Sarcasm by Reading In-Between (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sarcasm is a figurative speech act which manifests on social networks such as Twitter and Reddit. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that looks in-between rather than across to explicitly model contrast and incongruity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all datasets and improves interpretability. |
Inverse Scaling Can Become U-Shaped (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Scaling up language models has been shown to improve performance on a wide range of downstream tasks, but are there any tasks for which performance gets worse as models scale? |
| Approach: | They evaluate models trained on five times more compute and evaluated them on 280B parameters and 500 zettaFLOPs of training compute. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that performance decreases as models scale and increases again as models get larger. |
BIG-Bench Extra Hard (2025.acl-long)
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Mehran Kazemi, Bahare Fatemi, Hritik Bansal, John Palowitch, Chrysovalantis Anastasiou, Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Lalit K Jain, Virginia Aglietti, Disha Jindal, Peter Chen, Nishanth Dikkala, Gladys Tyen, Xin Liu, Uri Shalit, Silvia Chiappa, Kate Olszewska, Yi Tay, Vinh Q. Tran, Quoc V Le, Orhan Firat
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks for large language model reasoning focus on math and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate general reasoning in large language models . they use BIG-Bench and its harder version BIG-Benefit Hard to assess general reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark pushes the boundaries of LLM reasoning evaluation. |
Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yi Tay, Jason Wei, Hyung Chung, Vinh Tran, David So, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Steven Zheng, Jinfeng Rao, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Neil Houlsby, Quoc Le, Mostafa Dehghani
| Challenge: | Existing scaling of language models is expensive and requires significant computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that substantially improves existing language models and their scaling curves with a relatively tiny amount of extra compute. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves existing language models and their scaling curves with a relatively tiny amount of extra compute. |
Interactive Machine Comprehension with Information Seeking Agents (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to real-world applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reframes existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) datasets as interactive, partially observable environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method "occludes" the majority of a document’s text and adds context-sensitive commands that reveal "glimpses" of the hidden text to a model. |
Knowledge Router: Learning Disentangled Representations for Knowledge Graphs (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from relational patterns and structural information ignore the intrinsic complexity of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn latent properties of KG entities by using a neighborhood mechanism to disentangle the inner properties of each entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on key metrics on several benchmark datasets. |
Would you Rather? A New Benchmark for Learning Machine Alignment with Cultural Values and Social Preferences (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on optimal decision-making are limited and only consider individuals in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a task and corpus for learning alignments between machine and human preferences based on a gamified voting game . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task and corpus show that current state-of-the-art NLP models still leave much room for improvement. |
On Orthogonality Constraints for Transformers (2021.acl-short)
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Aston Zhang, Alvin Chan, Yi Tay, Jie Fu, Shuohang Wang, Shuai Zhang, Huajie Shao, Shuochao Yao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
| Challenge: | a dedicated study on orthogonality constraints for transformers has been lacking . plug-and-play constraints increase the BLEU of transformers . |
| Approach: | They propose to use plug-and-play constraints to encourage matrices to be orthogonal for numerical stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed constraint increases the BLEU on the large-scale WMT’16 EnDe benchmark by a factor of 28.4 to 29.6. |
Compare, Compress and Propagate: Enhancing Neural Architectures with Alignment Factorization for Natural Language Inference (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a new architecture, alignment pairs are compared, compressed and then propagated to upper layers for enhanced representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture where alignment pairs are compared, compressed and then propagated to upper layers for enhanced representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves competitive performance on three popular benchmarks, SNLI, MultiNLI and SciTail, while maintaining lightweight parameter size. |
How Reliable are Model Diagnostics? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary statistical models trade off interpretability and simplicity for powerful parameterizations and inductive biases, enabling impressive performance. |
| Approach: | They examine three recent models and find they are not yet reliable . they also formulate recommendations for practitioners and researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are not as reliable as previously assumed, the authors argue . their findings suggest that they are needed for improving models and training setups . |
Are Pretrained Convolutions Better than Pretrained Transformers? (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has shown promise in entirely convolutional, or CNN, architectures, but they have not been explored using the pre-train-fine-tune paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the pre-train-fine-tune paradigm to study convolutional models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures outperform Transformers in certain scenarios, but with caveats. |
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 . |
Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them (2023.findings-acl)
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Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Scales, Nathanael Schärli, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yi Tay, Hyung Won Chung, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Quoc Le, Ed Chi, Denny Zhou, Jason Wei
| Challenge: | Language models have already made good progress on this benchmark, with the best model outperforming average reported human-rater results on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chain-of-thought prompting to challenge language models on 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks which they call BIG-Bench Hard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language models outperform the average human-rater on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks. |
Reverse Engineering Configurations of Neural Text Generation Models (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural text generation modeling have raised concerns about how such approaches might be used in malicious ways. |
| Approach: | They propose to distinguish which of several variants of a given model generated some piece of text by performing diagnostic tests. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method identifies which of several variants of a given model generated some piece of text and if so, if it is more sensitive to different modeling choices than previously thought. |
Lightweight and Efficient Neural Natural Language Processing with Quaternion Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing are heavily parameterized and memory inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of lightweight and memory efficient neural architectures for NLP tasks . they propose quaternion algebra and hypercomplex spaces for computation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models enable expressive inter-component interactions and significantly reduce parameter size without loss of performance. |
Poison Attacks against Text Datasets with Conditional Adversarially Regularized Autoencoder (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using a poison signature, attackers can manipulate training data to manipulate the target class at test time. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor poisoning attack that generates poisoned training samples by poison injection in latent space and a conditional adversarially regularized autoencoder to generate poisones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack generates poisoned training samples by poison injection in latent space and shows that the target class can be steered to the poison class with success rates of >80% when the input hypothesis is injected with the poison signature. |
Co-Stack Residual Affinity Networks with Multi-level Attention Refinement for Matching Text Sequences (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a long standing problem in NLP research is learning a matching function between two text sequences . a deep architecture for this task is proposed by a team of researchers . |
| Approach: | They propose a new deep matching model using stacked recurrent encoders to learn affinity weights . they conduct extensive experiments on six well-studied text sequence matching datasets a plethora of applications are possible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on six well-studied text sequence matching datasets. |
Dense Feature Memory Augmented Transformers for COVID-19 Vaccination Search Classification (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Jai Gupta, Yi Tay, Chaitanya Kamath, Vinh Tran, Donald Metzler, Shailesh Bavadekar, Mimi Sun, Evgeniy Gabrilovich
| Challenge: | a new method for classification of COVID-19 vaccination related search queries is proposed . the proposed method uses pretrained Transformers and dense features to generate search insights . |
| Approach: | They propose a machine learning model that detects COVID-19 vaccination related search queries . they use pretrained Transformers to consider dense features as memory tokens that the model can attend to . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the Vaccine Search Insights task by +15% . the proposed model uses pretrained Transformers and traditional dense features . |
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Tao Chen, Zhen Qin, Jing Lu, Dara Bahri, Ji Ma, Jai Gupta, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster. |
CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai
| Challenge: | Many natural language processing tasks require long inputs, but processing long documents with a Transformer model is expensive due to quadratic attention complexity and applying feedforward and attention projection layers to every input token. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-input Transformer model that builds on the intuition that some tokens are more important than others and uses conditional computation to devote more computation to important tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves stronger performance than LongT5 with faster training and inference, achieving SOTA on the long-input SCROLLS benchmark. |
Improving Compositional Generalization with Self-Training for Data-to-Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Data-to-text generation focuses on generating fluent natural language responses from structured meaning representations (MRs). |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based input representation that greatly improves the model’s generalization capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves tree accuracy by 46%+ and reduces slot error rates by 73%+ over the strong baselines on SGD and Weather benchmarks. |
Sharpness-Aware Minimization Improves Language Model Generalization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Comparatively little work has been done to improve the generalization of language models . recent work shows that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) can improve generalization without much computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sharpness-Aware Minimization procedure that encourages convergence to flatter minima to improve generalization of language models without much computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed Sharpness-Aware Minimization procedure can improve language models without much computational overhead. |