BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//128.220.36.25//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.26.9// CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-FROM-URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20231105T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RDATE:20241103T020000 TZNAME:EST END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20240310T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RDATE:20250309T020000 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22394@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T192908Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nModel robustness and spurious correlations have received increasing atten tion in the NLP community\, both in methods and evaluation. The term “spur ious correlation” is overloaded though and can refer to any undesirable sh ortcuts learned by the model\, as judged by domain experts.
\nWhen designing mitigation algorithms\, we oft en (implicitly) assume that a spurious feature is irrelevant for predictio n. However\, many features in NLP (e.g. word overlap and negation) are not spurious in the sense that the background is spurious for classifying obj ects in an image. In contrast\, they carry important information that’s ne eded to make predictions by humans. In this talk\, we argue that it is mor e productive to characterize features in terms of their necessity and suff iciency for prediction. We then discuss the implications of this categoriz ation in representation\, learning\, and evaluation.
\nBiogr aphy
\nHe He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Data Science at New York University. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland\, C ollege Park. Before joining NYU\, she spent a year at AWS AI and was a pos t-doc at Stanford University before that. She is interested in building ro bust and trustworthy NLP systems in human-centered settings. Her recent re search focus includes robust language understanding\, collaborative text g eneration\, and understanding capabilities and issues of large language mo dels.
\n DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221014T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:He He (New York University) “What We Talk about When We Talk about Spurious Correlations in NLP” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/he-he-new-york-university/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,He\,October END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-22412@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T192908Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:Abstract
\nDriven by the goal of erad icating language barriers on a global scale\, machine translation has soli dified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. Ho wever\, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages\, l eaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What doe s it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe\, high-qua lity results\, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In this t alk\, I introduce No Language Left Behind\, an initiative to break languag e barriers for low-resource languages. In No Language Left Behind\, we too k on the low-resource language translation challenge by first contextualiz ing the need for translation support through exploratory interviews with n ative speakers. Then\, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing t he performance gap between low and high-resource languages. We proposed mu ltiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting w hile training on thousands of tasks. Critically\, we evaluated the perform ance of over 40\,000 different translation directions using a human-transl ated benchmark\, Flores-200\, and combined human evaluation with a novel t oxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translati on safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the p revious state-of-the-art\, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system in an open-source manner.
\nBi ography
\nAngela is a research scientis t at Meta AI Research in New York\, focusing on supporting efforts in spee ch and language research. Recent projects include No Language Left Behind (https://ai.facebook.com/r esearch/no-language-left-behind/) and Universal Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages (https://ai.faceb ook.com/blog/ai-translation-hokkien/). Before translation\, Angela pre viously focused on research in on-device models for NLP and computer visio n and text generation.
\nDTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221118T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221118T131500 LOCATION:Hackerman Hall B17 @ 3400 N. Charles Street\, Baltimore\, MD 21218 SEQUENCE:0 SUMMARY:Angela Fan (Meta AI Research) “No Language Left Behind: Scaling Hu man-Centered Machine Translation” URL:https://www.clsp.jhu.edu/events/angela-fan-facebook/ X-COST-TYPE:free X-TAGS;LANGUAGE=en-US:2022\,Fan\,November END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT UID:ai1ec-23304@www.clsp.jhu.edu DTSTAMP:20240328T192908Z CATEGORIES;LANGUAGE=en-US:Seminars CONTACT: DESCRIPTION:
Abstract
\nTransformers are essential to pretraining. As we approach 5 years of BERT\, the connection between a ttention as architecture and transfer learning remains key to this central thread in NLP. Other architectures such as CNNs and RNNs have been used t o replicate pretraining results\, but these either fail to reach the same accuracy or require supplemental attention layers. This work revisits the semanal BERT result and considers pretraining without attention. We consid er replacing self-attention layers with recently developed approach for lo ng-range sequence modeling and transformer architecture variants. Specific ally\, inspired by recent papers like the structured space space sequence model (S4)\, we use simple routing layers based on state-space models (SSM ) and a bidirectional model architecture based on multiplicative gating. W e discuss the results of the proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) and p resent a range of analysis into its properties. Results show that architec ture does seem to have a notable impact on downstream performance and a di fferent inductive bias that is worth exploring further.
\nBi ography
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