Dominican Republic

We present Hidden-State Optimization (HSO), a gradient-based method for improving the performance of transformer language models at inference time. Similar to dynamic evaluation (Krause et al., 2018), HSO computes the gradient of the log-probability the language model assigns to an evaluation text, but uses it to update the cached hidden states rather than the model parameters. We test HSO with pretrained Transformer-XL and GPT-2 language models, finding improvement on the WikiText-103 and PG-19 datasets in terms of perplexity, especially when evaluating a model outside of its training distribution. We also demonstrate downstream applicability by showing gains in the recently developed prompt-based few-shot evaluation setting, again with no extra parameters or training data.

EMNLP 2021

Reconsidering the Past: Optimizing Hidden States in Language Models

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Adversarial regularization can improve model generalization in many natural language processing tasks.
However, conventional approaches are computationally expensive since they need to generate a perturbation for each sample in each epoch. We propose a new adversarial regularization method ARCH (adversarial regularization with caching), where perturbations are generated and cached once every several epochs. As caching all the perturbations imposes memory usage concerns, we adopt a K-nearest neighbors-based strategy to tackle this issue. The strategy only requires caching a small amount of perturbations, without introducing additional training time. We evaluate our proposed method on a set of neural machine translation and natural language understanding tasks. We observe that ARCH significantly eases the computational burden (saves up to 70% of computational time in comparison with conventional approaches). More surprisingly, by reducing the variance of stochastic gradients, ARCH produces a notably better (in most of the tasks) or comparable model generalization. Our code is publicly available.

{ARCH}: Efficient Adversarial Regularized Training with Caching

Word embedding is essential for neural network models for various natural language processing tasks.
Since the word embedding usually has a considerable size, in order to deploy a neural network model having it on edge devices, it should be effectively compressed.
There was a study for proposing a block-wise low-rank approximation method for word embedding, called GroupReduce.
Even if their structure is effective, the properties behind the concept of the block-wise word embedding compression were not sufficiently explored.
Motivated by this, we improve GroupReduce in terms of word weighting and structuring.
For word weighting, we propose a simple yet effective method inspired by the term frequency-inverse document frequency method and 
a novel differentiable method.
Based on them, we construct a discriminative word embedding compression algorithm.
In the experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm more effectively finds word weights than competitors in most cases.
In addition, we show that the proposed algorithm can act like a framework through successful cooperation with quantization.

Block-wise Word Embedding Compression Revisited: Better Weighting and Structuring

Among the most critical limitations of deep learning NLP models are their lack of interpretability, and their reliance on spurious correlations. Prior work proposed various approaches to interpreting the black-box models to unveil the spurious correlations, but the research was primarily used in human-computer interaction scenarios. It still remains underexplored whether or how such model interpretations can be used to automatically ``unlearn'' confounding features. In this work, we propose influence tuning---a procedure that leverages model interpretations to update the model parameters towards a plausible interpretation (rather than an interpretation that relies on spurious patterns in the data) in addition to learning to predict the task labels. We show that in a controlled setup, influence tuning can help deconfounding the model from spurious patterns in data, significantly outperforming baseline methods that use adversarial training.

Influence Tuning: Demoting Spurious Correlations via Instance Attribution and Instance-Driven Updates

Social media has emerged as a key channel for seeking information. Online users spend several hours reading, posting, and searching for news on microblogging platforms daily. However, this could act as a double-edged sword especially when not all information online is reliable. Moreover, the inherently unmoderated nature of social media renders identifying unverified information ever more challenging. Most of the existing approaches for rumor tracking are not scalable because of their dependency on a significant amount of labeled data. In this work, we investigate this problem from different angles. We design an Active-Transfer Learning (ATL) strategy to identify rumors with a limited amount of annotated data. We go beyond that and investigate the impact of leveraging various machine learning approaches in addition to different contextual representations. We discuss the impact of multiple classifiers on a limited amount of annotated data followed by an interactive approach to gradually update the models by adding the least certain samples (LCS) from the pool of unlabeled data. Our proposed Active Learning (AL) strategy achieves faster convergence in terms of the F-score while requiring fewer annotated samples (42% of the whole dataset for the best model).

Active Learning for Rumor Identification on Social Media

Recent work in multilingual natural language processing has shown progress in various tasks such as natural language inference and joint multilingual translation. Despite success in learning across many languages, challenges arise where multilingual training regimes often boost performance on some languages at the expense of others. For multilingual named entity recognition (NER) we propose a simple technique that groups similar languages together by using embeddings from a pre-trained masked language model, and automatically discovering language clusters in this embedding space. Specifically, we fine-tune an XLM-Roberta model on a language identification task, and use embeddings from this model for clustering. We conduct experiments on 15 diverse languages in the WikiAnn dataset and show our technique largely outperforms three baselines: (1) training a multilingual model jointly on all available languages, (2) training one monolingual model per language, and (3) grouping languages by linguistic family. We also conduct analyses showing meaningful multilingual transfer for low-resource languages (Swahili and Yoruba), despite being automatically grouped with other seemingly disparate languages.

Language Clustering for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition

Recent multilingual pre-trained models, like XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R), have been demonstrated effective in many cross-lingual tasks. However, there are still gaps between the contextualized representations of similar words in different languages. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework named Multi-View Mixed Language Training (MVMLT), which leverages code-switched data with multi-view learning to fine-tune XLM-R. MVMLT uses gradient-based saliency to extract keywords which are the most relevant to downstream tasks and replaces them with the corresponding words in the target language dynamically. Furthermore, MVMLT utilizes multi-view learning to encourage contextualized embeddings to align into a more refined language-invariant space. Extensive experiments with four languages show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on zero-shot cross-lingual sentiment classification and dialogue state tracking tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Saliency-based Multi-View Mixed Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Classification

Data-driven subword segmentation has become the default strategy for open-vocabulary machine translation and other NLP tasks, but may not be sufficiently generic for optimal learning of non-concatenative morphology. We design a test suite to evaluate segmentation strategies on different types of morphological phenomena in a controlled, semi-synthetic setting. In our experiments, we compare how well machine translation models trained on subword- and character-level can translate these morphological phenomena. We find that learning to analyse and generate morphologically complex surface representations is still challenging, especially for non-concatenative morphological phenomena like reduplication or vowel harmony and for rare word stems. Based on our results, we recommend that novel text representation strategies be tested on a range of typologically diverse languages to minimise the risk of adopting a strategy that inadvertently disadvantages certain languages.

How Suitable Are Subword Segmentation Strategies for Translating Non-Concatenative Morphology?

Adapters are light-weight modules that allow parameter-efficient fine-tuning of pretrained models. Specialized language and task adapters have recently been proposed to facilitate cross-lingual transfer of multilingual pretrained models (Pfeiffer et al., 2020b). However, this approach requires training a separate language adapter for every language one wishes to support, which can be impractical for languages with limited data. An intuitive solution is to use a related language adapter for the new language variety, but we observe that this solution can lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we aim to improve the robustness of language adapters to uncovered languages without training new adapters. We find that ensembling multiple existing language adapters makes the fine-tuned model significantly more robust to other language varieties not included in these adapters. Building upon this observation, we propose Entropy Minimized Ensemble of Adapters (EMEA), a method that optimizes the ensemble weights of the pretrained language adapters for each test sentence by minimizing the entropy of its predictions. Experiments on three diverse groups of language varieties show that our method leads to significant improvements on both named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging across all languages.

Efficient Test Time Adapter Ensembling for Low-resource Language Varieties

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by jointly attending to information from different representation subspaces at different positions. In this paper, we present an approach to learning a hard retrieval attention where an attention head only attends to one token in the sentence rather than all tokens. The matrix multiplication between attention probabilities and the value sequence in the standard scaled dot-product attention can thus be replaced by a simple and efficient retrieval operation. We show that our hard retrieval attention mechanism is 1.43 times faster in decoding, while preserving translation quality on a wide range of machine translation tasks when used in the decoder self- and cross-attention networks.

Learning Hard Retrieval Decoder Attention for Transformers

Multilingual pre-trained models have demonstrated their effectiveness in many multilingual NLP tasks and enabled zero-shot or few-shot transfer from high-resource languages to low-resource ones. However, due to significant typological differences and contradictions between some languages, such models usually perform poorly on many languages and cross-lingual settings, which shows the difficulty of learning a single model to handle massive diverse languages well at the same time. 
To alleviate this issue, we present a new multilingual pre-training pipeline. We propose to generate language representation from multilingual pre-trained model and conduct linguistic analysis to show that language representation similarity reflects linguistic similarity from multiple perspectives, including language family, geographical sprachbund, lexicostatistics, and syntax.
Then we cluster all the target languages into multiple groups and name each group as a representation sprachbund. Thus, languages in the same representation sprachbund are supposed to boost each other in both pre-training and fine-tuning as they share rich linguistic similarity.
We pre-train one multilingual model for each representation sprachbund. Experiments are conducted on cross-lingual benchmarks and significant improvements are achieved compared to strong baselines.

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