Answering questions asked from instructional corpora such as E-manuals, recipe books, etc., has been far less studied than open-domain factoid context-based question answering. This can be primarily attributed to the absence of standard benchmark datasets. In this paper we meticulously create a large amount of data connected with E-manuals and develop suitable algorithm to exploit it. We collect E-Manual Corpus, a huge corpus of 307,957 E-manuals and pretrain RoBERTa on this large corpus. We create various benchmark QA datasets which include question answer pairs curated by experts based upon two E-manuals, real user questions from Community Question Answering Forum pertaining to E-manuals etc. We introduce EMQAP (E-Manual Question Answering Pipeline) that answers questions pertaining to electronics devices. Built upon the pretrained RoBERTa, it harbors a supervised multi-task learning framework which efficiently performs the dual tasks of identifying the section in the E-manual where the answer can be found and the exact answer span within that section. For E-Manual annotated question-answer pairs, we show an improvement of about 40% in ROUGE-L F1 scores over the most competitive baseline. We perform a detailed ablation study and establish the versatility of EMQAP across different circumstances. The code and datasets are shared at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/EMNLP-2021-Findings, and the corresponding project website is https://sites.google.com/view/emanualqa/home.
A key problem in multi-task learning (MTL) research is how to select high-quality auxiliary tasks automatically. This paper presents GradTS, an automatic auxiliary task selection method based on gradient calculation in Transformer-based models. Compared to AUTOSEM, a strong baseline method, GradTS improves the performance of MT-DNN with a bert-base-cased backend model, from 0.33% to 17.93% on 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmarks. GradTS is also time-saving since (1) its gradient calculations are based on single-task experiments and (2) the gradients are re-used without additional experiments when the candidate task set changes. On the 8 GLUE classification tasks, for example, GradTS costs on average 21.32% less time than AUTOSEM with comparable GPU consumption. Further, we show the robustness of GradTS across various task settings and model selections, e.g. mixed objectives among candidate tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of GradTS in these case studies illustrate its general applicability in MTL research without requiring manual task filtering or costly parameter tuning.
Multi-task learning (MTL) is an efficient way to improve the performance of related tasks by sharing knowledge. However, most existing MTL networks run on a single end and are not suitable for collaborative intelligence (CI) scenarios. In this work, we propose an MTL network with a deep joint source-channel coding (JSCC) framework, which allows operating under CI scenarios. We first propose a feature fusion based MTL network (FFMNet) for joint object detection and semantic segmentation. Compared with other MTL networks, FFMNet gets higher performance with fewer parameters. Then FFMNet is split into two parts, which run on a mobile device and an edge server respectively. The feature generated by the mobile device is transmitted through the wireless channel to the edge server. To reduce the transmission overhead of the intermediate feature, a deep JSCC network is designed. By combining two networks together, the whole model achieves 512x compression for the intermediate feature and a performance loss within 2% on both tasks. At last, by training with noise, the FFMNet with JSCC is robust to various channel conditions and outperforms the separate source and channel coding scheme.
Multi-task learning can leverage information learned by one task to benefit the training of other tasks. Despite this capacity, naively training all tasks together in one model often degrades performance, and exhaustively searching through combinations of task groupings can be prohibitively expensive. As a result, efficiently identifying the tasks that would benefit from training together remains a challenging design question without a clear solution. In this paper, we suggest an approach to select which tasks should train together in multi-task learning models. Our method determines task groupings in a single run by training all tasks together and quantifying the effect to which one task's gradient would affect another task's loss. On the large-scale Taskonomy computer vision dataset, we find this method can decrease test loss by 10.0% compared to simply training all tasks together while operating 11.6 times faster than a state-of-the-art task grouping method.
Transformers have recently become very popular for sequence-to-sequence applications such as machine translation and speech recognition. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning-based transformer model for low-resource multilingual speech recognition for Indian languages. Our proposed model consists of a conformer [1] encoder and two parallel transformer decoders. We use a phoneme decoder (PHN-DEC) for the phoneme recognition task and a grapheme decoder (GRP-DEC) to predict grapheme sequence. We consider the phoneme recognition task as an auxiliary task for our multi-task learning framework. We jointly optimize the network for both phoneme and grapheme recognition tasks using Joint CTC-Attention [2] training. We use a conditional decoding scheme to inject the language information into the model before predicting the grapheme sequence. Our experiments show that our proposed approach can obtain significant improvement over previous approaches [4]. We also show that our conformer-based dual-decoder approach outperforms both the transformer-based dual-decoder approach and single decoder approach. Finally, We compare monolingual ASR models with our proposed multilingual ASR approach.
We introduce ELIT, the Emory Language and Information Toolkit, which is a comprehensive NLP framework providing transformer-based end-to-end models for core tasks with a special focus on memory efficiency while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy and speed. Compared to existing toolkits, ELIT features an efficient Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model with many downstream tasks that include lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, dependency parsing, constituency parsing, semantic role labeling, and AMR parsing. The backbone of ELIT's MTL framework is a pre-trained transformer encoder that is shared across tasks to speed up their inference. ELIT provides pre-trained models developed on a remix of eight datasets. To scale up its service, ELIT also integrates a RESTful Client/Server combination. On the server side, ELIT extends its functionality to cover other tasks such as tokenization and coreference resolution, providing an end user with agile research experience. All resources including the source codes, documentation, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/emorynlp/elit.
In the context of neural machine translation, data augmentation (DA) techniques may be used for generating additional training samples when the available parallel data are scarce. Many DA approaches aim at expanding the support of the empirical data distribution by generating new sentence pairs that contain infrequent words, thus making it closer to the true data distribution of parallel sentences. In this paper, we propose to follow a completely different approach and present a multi-task DA approach in which we generate new sentence pairs with transformations, such as reversing the order of the target sentence, which produce unfluent target sentences. During training, these augmented sentences are used as auxiliary tasks in a multi-task framework with the aim of providing new contexts where the target prefix is not informative enough to predict the next word. This strengthens the encoder and forces the decoder to pay more attention to the source representations of the encoder. Experiments carried out on six low-resource translation tasks show consistent improvements over the baseline and over DA methods aiming at extending the support of the empirical data distribution. The systems trained with our approach rely more on the source tokens, are more robust against domain shift and suffer less hallucinations.
Transformer-based models have recently become very popular for sequence-to-sequence applications such as machine translation and speech recognition. This work proposes a dual-decoder transformer model for low-resource multilingual speech recognition for Indian languages. Our proposed model consists of a Conformer [1] encoder, two parallel transformer decoders, and a language classifier. We use a phoneme decoder (PHN-DEC) for the phoneme recognition task and a grapheme decoder (GRP-DEC) to predict grapheme sequence along with language information. We consider phoneme recognition and language identification as auxiliary tasks in the multi-task learning framework. We jointly optimize the network for phoneme recognition, grapheme recognition, and language identification tasks with Joint CTC-Attention [2] training. Our experiments show that we can obtain a significant reduction in WER over the baseline approaches. We also show that our dual-decoder approach obtains significant improvement over the single decoder approach.
User purchasing prediction with multi-behavior information remains a challenging problem for current recommendation systems. Various methods have been proposed to address it via leveraging the advantages of graph neural networks (GNNs) or multi-task learning. However, most existing works do not take the complex dependencies among different behaviors of users into consideration. They utilize simple and fixed schemes, like neighborhood information aggregation or mathematical calculation of vectors, to fuse the embeddings of different user behaviors to obtain a unified embedding to represent a user's behavioral patterns which will be used in downstream recommendation tasks. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we first propose the concept of hyper meta-path to construct hyper meta-paths or hyper meta-graphs to explicitly illustrate the dependencies among different behaviors of a user. How to obtain a unified embedding for a user from hyper meta-paths and avoid the previously mentioned limitations simultaneously is critical. Thanks to the recent success of graph contrastive learning, we leverage it to learn embeddings of user behavior patterns adaptively instead of assigning a fixed scheme to understand the dependencies among different behaviors. A new graph contrastive learning based framework is proposed by coupling with hyper meta-paths, namely HMG-CR, which consistently and significantly outperforms all baselines in extensive comparison experiments.
Human coders assign standardized medical codes to clinical documents generated during patients' hospitalization, which is error-prone and labor-intensive. Automated medical coding approaches have been developed using machine learning methods such as deep neural networks. Nevertheless, automated medical coding is still challenging because of the imbalanced class problem, complex code association, and noise in lengthy documents. To solve these issues, we propose a novel neural network called Multitask Balanced and Recalibrated Neural Network. Significantly, the multitask learning scheme shares the relationship knowledge between different code branches to capture the code association. A recalibrated aggregation module is developed by cascading convolutional blocks to extract high-level semantic features that mitigate the impact of noise in documents. Also, the cascaded structure of the recalibrated module can benefit the learning from lengthy notes. To solve the class imbalanced problem, we deploy the focal loss to redistribute the attention of low and high-frequency medical codes. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines on a real-world clinical dataset MIMIC-III.
Coherence is an important aspect of text quality and is crucial for ensuring its readability. It is essential desirable for outputs from text generation systems like summarization, question answering, machine translation, question generation, table-to-text, etc. An automated coherence scoring model is also helpful in essay scoring or providing writing feedback. A large body of previous work has leveraged entity-based methods, syntactic patterns, discourse relations, and more recently traditional deep learning architectures for text coherence assessment. Previous work suffers from drawbacks like the inability to handle long-range dependencies, out-of-vocabulary words, or model sequence information. We hypothesize that coherence assessment is a cognitively complex task that requires deeper models and can benefit from other related tasks. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose four different Transformer-based architectures for the task: vanilla Transformer, hierarchical Transformer, multi-task learning-based model, and a model with fact-based input representation. Our experiments with popular benchmark datasets across multiple domains on four different coherence assessment tasks demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming existing models by a good margin.
Multi-variate time series (MTS) data is a ubiquitous class of data abstraction in the real world. Any instance of MTS is generated from a hybrid dynamical system and their specific dynamics are usually unknown. The hybrid nature of such a dynamical system is a result of complex external attributes, such as geographic location and time of day, each of which can be categorized into either spatial attributes or temporal attributes. Therefore, there are two fundamental views which can be used to analyze MTS data, namely the spatial view and the temporal view. Moreover, from each of these two views, we can partition the set of data samples of MTS into disjoint forecasting tasks in accordance with their associated attribute values. Then, samples of the same task will manifest similar forthcoming pattern, which is less sophisticated to be predicted in comparison with the original single-view setting. Considering this insight, we propose a novel multi-view multi-task (MVMT) learning framework for MTS forecasting. Instead of being explicitly presented in most scenarios, MVMT information is deeply concealed in the MTS data, which severely hinders the model from capturing it naturally. To this end, we develop two kinds of basic operations, namely task-wise affine transformation and task-wise normalization, respectively. Applying these two operations with prior knowledge on the spatial and temporal view allows the model to adaptively extract MVMT information while predicting. Extensive experiments on three datasets are conducted to illustrate that canonical architectures can be greatly enhanced by the MVMT learning framework in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, we design rich case studies to reveal the properties of representations produced at different phases in the entire prediction procedure.
Single-task learning in artificial neural networks will be able to learn the model very well, and the benefits brought by transferring knowledge thus become limited. In this regard, when the number of tasks increases (e.g., semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and 3D point cloud), duplicate information may exist across tasks, and the improvement becomes less significant. Multi-task learning has emerged as a solution to knowledge-transfer issues and is an approach to scene understanding which involves multiple related tasks each with potentially limited training data. Multi-task learning improves generalization by leveraging the domain-specific information contained in the training data of related tasks. In urban management applications such as infrastructure development, traffic monitoring, smart 3D cities, and change detection, automated multi-task data analysis for scene understanding based on the semantic, instance, and panoptic annotation, as well as monocular depth estimation, is required to generate precise urban models. In this study, a common framework for the performance assessment of multi-task learning methods from fixed-wing UAV images for 2D/3D city modeling is presented.
Pre-trained models for Natural Languages (NL) like BERT and GPT have been recently shown to transfer well to Programming Languages (PL) and largely benefit a broad set of code-related tasks. Despite their success, most current methods either rely on an encoder-only (or decoder-only) pre-training that is suboptimal for generation (resp. understanding) tasks or process the code snippet in the same way as NL, neglecting the special characteristics of PL such as token types. We present CodeT5, a unified pre-trained encoder-decoder Transformer model that better leverages the code semantics conveyed from the developer-assigned identifiers. Our model employs a unified framework to seamlessly support both code understanding and generation tasks and allows for multi-task learning. Besides, we propose a novel identifier-aware pre-training task that enables the model to distinguish which code tokens are identifiers and to recover them when they are masked. Furthermore, we propose to exploit the user-written code comments with a bimodal dual generation task for better NL-PL alignment. Comprehensive experiments show that CodeT5 significantly outperforms prior methods on understanding tasks such as code defect detection and clone detection, and generation tasks across various directions including PL-NL, NL-PL, and PL-PL. Further analysis reveals that our model can better capture semantic information from code. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https: //github.com/salesforce/CodeT5 .
Industrial recommender systems are frequently tasked with approximating probabilities for multiple, often closely related, user actions. For example, predicting if a user will click on an advertisement and if they will then purchase the advertised product. The conceptual similarity between these tasks has promoted the use of multi-task learning: a class of algorithms that aim to bring positive inductive transfer from related tasks. Here, we empirically evaluate multi-task learning approaches with neural networks for an online advertising task. Specifically, we consider approximating the probability of post-click conversion events (installs) (CVR) for mobile app advertising on a large-scale advertising platform, using the related click events (CTR) as an auxiliary task. We use an ablation approach to systematically study recent approaches that incorporate both multitask learning and "entire space modeling" which train the CVR on all logged examples rather than learning a conditional likelihood of conversion given clicked. Based on these results we show that several different approaches result in similar levels of positive transfer from the data-abundant CTR task to the CVR task and offer some insight into how the multi-task design choices address the two primary problems affecting the CVR task: data sparsity and data bias. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that standard multi-task learning is a sensible approach to modelling related events in real-world large-scale applications and suggest the specific multitask approach can be guided by ease of implementation in an existing system.
Despite the proven effectiveness of Transformer neural networks across multiple domains, their performance with Electronic Health Records (EHR) can be nuanced. The unique, multidimensional sequential nature of EHR data can sometimes make even simple linear models with carefully engineered features more competitive. Thus, the advantages of Transformers, such as efficient transfer learning and improved scalability are not always fully exploited in EHR applications. Addressing these challenges, we introduce SANSformer, an attention-free sequential model designed with specific inductive biases to cater for the unique characteristics of EHR data. In this work, we aim to forecast the demand for healthcare services, by predicting the number of patient visits to healthcare facilities. The challenge amplifies when dealing with divergent patient subgroups, like those with rare diseases, which are characterized by unique health trajectories and are typically smaller in size. To address this, we employ a self-supervised pretraining strategy, Generative Summary Pretraining (GSP), which predicts future summary statistics based on past health records of a patient. Our models are pretrained on a health registry of nearly one million patients, then fine-tuned for specific subgroup prediction tasks, showcasing the potential to handle the multifaceted nature of EHR data. In evaluation, SANSformer consistently surpasses robust EHR baselines, with our GSP pretraining method notably amplifying model performance, particularly within smaller patient subgroups. Our results illuminate the promising potential of tailored attention-free models and self-supervised pretraining in refining healthcare utilization predictions across various patient demographics.
Many problems in machine learning rely on multi-task learning (MTL), in which the goal is to solve multiple related machine learning tasks simultaneously. MTL is particularly relevant for privacy-sensitive applications in areas such as healthcare, finance, and IoT computing, where sensitive data from multiple, varied sources are shared for the purpose of learning. In this work, we formalize notions of client-level privacy for MTL via joint differential privacy (JDP), a relaxation of differential privacy for mechanism design and distributed optimization. We then propose an algorithm for mean-regularized MTL, an objective commonly used for applications in personalized federated learning, subject to JDP. We analyze our objective and solver, providing certifiable guarantees on both privacy and utility. Empirically, we find that our method provides improved privacy/utility trade-offs relative to global baselines across common federated learning benchmarks.
Recent research in disaster informatics demonstrates a practical and important use case of artificial intelligence to save human lives and suffering during natural disasters based on social media contents (text and images). While notable progress has been made using texts, research on exploiting the images remains relatively under-explored. To advance image-based approaches, we propose MEDIC (Available at: https://crisisnlp.qcri.org/medic/index.html), which is the largest social media image classification dataset for humanitarian response consisting of 71,198 images to address four different tasks in a multi-task learning setup. This is the first dataset of its kind: social media images, disaster response, and multi-task learning research. An important property of this dataset is its high potential to facilitate research on multi-task learning, which recently receives much interest from the machine learning community and has shown remarkable results in terms of memory, inference speed, performance, and generalization capability. Therefore, the proposed dataset is an important resource for advancing image-based disaster management and multi-task machine learning research. We experiment with different deep learning architectures and report promising results, which are above the majority baselines for all tasks. Along with the dataset, we also release all relevant scripts (https://github.com/firojalam/medic).
Training deep networks for semantic segmentation requires large amounts of labeled training data, which presents a major challenge in practice, as labeling segmentation masks is a highly labor-intensive process. To address this issue, we present a framework for semi-supervised and domain-adaptive semantic segmentation, which is enhanced by self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SDE) trained only on unlabeled image sequences. In particular, we utilize SDE as an auxiliary task comprehensively across the entire learning framework: First, we automatically select the most useful samples to be annotated for semantic segmentation based on the correlation of sample diversity and difficulty between SDE and semantic segmentation. Second, we implement a strong data augmentation by mixing images and labels using the geometry of the scene. Third, we transfer knowledge from features learned during SDE to semantic segmentation by means of transfer and multi-task learning. And fourth, we exploit additional labeled synthetic data with Cross-Domain DepthMix and Matching Geometry Sampling to align synthetic and real data. We validate the proposed model on the Cityscapes dataset, where all four contributions demonstrate significant performance gains, and achieve state-of-the-art results for semi-supervised semantic segmentation as well as for semi-supervised domain adaptation. In particular, with only 1/30 of the Cityscapes labels, our method achieves 92% of the fully-supervised baseline performance and even 97% when exploiting additional data from GTA. The source code is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/improving_segmentation_with_selfsupervised_depth.
Despite the fast progress in training specialized models for various tasks, learning a single general model that works well for many tasks is still challenging for computer vision. Here we introduce multi-task self-training (MuST), which harnesses the knowledge in independent specialized teacher models (e.g., ImageNet model on classification) to train a single general student model. Our approach has three steps. First, we train specialized teachers independently on labeled datasets. We then use the specialized teachers to label an unlabeled dataset to create a multi-task pseudo labeled dataset. Finally, the dataset, which now contains pseudo labels from teacher models trained on different datasets/tasks, is then used to train a student model with multi-task learning. We evaluate the feature representations of the student model on 6 vision tasks including image recognition (classification, detection, segmentation)and 3D geometry estimation (depth and surface normal estimation). MuST is scalable with unlabeled or partially labeled datasets and outperforms both specialized supervised models and self-supervised models when training on large scale datasets. Lastly, we show MuST can improve upon already strong checkpoints trained with billions of examples. The results suggest self-training is a promising direction to aggregate labeled and unlabeled training data for learning general feature representations.