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CoDa: Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLP
Mar 30, 2024
We present CoDa (Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation), a controllable, effective, and training-free data augmentation technique for low-resource (data-scarce) NLP. Our approach is based on prompting off-the-shelf instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating text that satisfies a set of constraints. Precisely, we extract a set of simple constraints from every instance in the low-resource dataset and verbalize them to prompt an LLM to generate novel and diverse training instances. Our findings reveal that synthetic data that follows simple constraints in the downstream dataset act as highly effective augmentations, and CoDa can achieve this without intricate decoding-time constrained generation techniques or fine-tuning with complex algorithms that eventually make the model biased toward the small number of training instances. Additionally, CoDa is the first framework that provides users explicit control over the augmentation generation process, thereby also allowing easy adaptation to several domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoDa across 11 datasets spanning 3 tasks and 3 low-resource settings. CoDa outperforms all our baselines, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements of 0.12%-7.19%. Code is available here: https://github.com/Sreyan88/CoDa
A Closer Look at the Limitations of Instruction Tuning
Feb 03, 2024Instruction Tuning (IT), the process of training large language models (LLMs) using instruction-response pairs, has emerged as the predominant method for transforming base pre-trained LLMs into open-domain conversational agents. While IT has achieved notable success and widespread adoption, its limitations and shortcomings remain underexplored. In this paper, through rigorous experiments and an in-depth analysis of the changes LLMs undergo through IT, we reveal various limitations of IT. In particular, we show that (1) IT fails to enhance knowledge or skills in LLMs. LoRA fine-tuning is limited to learning response initiation and style tokens, and full-parameter fine-tuning leads to knowledge degradation. (2) Copying response patterns from IT datasets derived from knowledgeable sources leads to a decline in response quality. (3) Full-parameter fine-tuning increases hallucination by inaccurately borrowing tokens from conceptually similar instances in the IT dataset for generating responses. (4) Popular methods to improve IT do not lead to performance improvements over a simple LoRA fine-tuned model. Our findings reveal that responses generated solely from pre-trained knowledge consistently outperform responses by models that learn any form of new knowledge from IT on open-source datasets. We hope the insights and challenges revealed inspire future work.
RECAP: Retrieval-Augmented Audio Captioning
Sep 18, 2023We present RECAP (REtrieval-Augmented Audio CAPtioning), a novel and effective audio captioning system that generates captions conditioned on an input audio and other captions similar to the audio retrieved from a datastore. Additionally, our proposed method can transfer to any domain without the need for any additional fine-tuning. To generate a caption for an audio sample, we leverage an audio-text model CLAP to retrieve captions similar to it from a replaceable datastore, which are then used to construct a prompt. Next, we feed this prompt to a GPT-2 decoder and introduce cross-attention layers between the CLAP encoder and GPT-2 to condition the audio for caption generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Clotho and AudioCaps, show that RECAP achieves competitive performance in in-domain settings and significant improvements in out-of-domain settings. Additionally, due to its capability to exploit a large text-captions-only datastore in a \textit{training-free} fashion, RECAP shows unique capabilities of captioning novel audio events never seen during training and compositional audios with multiple events. To promote research in this space, we also release 150,000+ new weakly labeled captions for AudioSet, AudioCaps, and Clotho.
ASPIRE: Language-Guided Augmentation for Robust Image Classification
Aug 19, 2023
Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. Supplementing the training dataset with images without such spurious features can aid robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for expanding the training dataset with synthetic images without spurious features. ASPIRE, guided by language, generates these images without requiring any form of additional supervision or existing examples. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ASPIRE on 4 datasets, including the very challenging Hard ImageNet dataset, and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. Code soon at: https://github.com/Sreyan88/ASPIRE.