arXiv subjects

Shikun Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Shikun Feng.

52 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

ERNIE-mmLayout: Multi-grained MultiModal Transformer for Document Understanding

Recent efforts of multimodal Transformers have improved Visually Rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks via incorporating visual and textual information. However, existing approaches mainly focus on fine-grained elements such as words and document image patches, making it hard for them to learn from coarse-grained elements, including natural lexical units like phrases and salient visual regions like prominent image regions. In this paper, we attach more importance to coarse-grained elements containing high-density information and consistent semantics, which are valuable for document understanding. At first, a document graph is proposed to model complex relationships among multi-grained multimodal elements, in which salient visual regions are detected by a cluster-based method. Then, a multi-grained multimodal Transformer called mmLayout is proposed to incorporate coarse-grained information into existing pre-trained fine-grained multimodal Transformers based on the graph. In mmLayout, coarse-grained information is aggregated from fine-grained, and then, after further processing, is fused back into fine-grained for final prediction. Furthermore, common sense enhancement is introduced to exploit the semantic information of natural lexical units. Experimental results on four tasks, including information extraction and document question answering, show that our method can improve the performance of multimodal Transformers based on fine-grained elements and achieve better performance with fewer parameters. Qualitative analyses show that our method can capture consistent semantics in coarse-grained elements.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

DuETA: Traffic Congestion Propagation Pattern Modeling via Efficient Graph Learning for ETA Prediction at Baidu Maps

Estimated time of arrival (ETA) prediction, also known as travel time estimation, is a fundamental task for a wide range of intelligent transportation applications, such as navigation, route planning, and ride-hailing services. To accurately predict the travel time of a route, it is essential to take into account both contextual and predictive factors, such as spatial-temporal interaction, driving behavior, and traffic congestion propagation inference. The ETA prediction models previously deployed at Baidu Maps have addressed the factors of spatial-temporal interaction (ConSTGAT) and driving behavior (SSML). In this work, we focus on modeling traffic congestion propagation patterns to improve ETA performance. Traffic congestion propagation pattern modeling is challenging, and it requires accounting for impact regions over time and cumulative effect of delay variations over time caused by traffic events on the road network. In this paper, we present a practical industrial-grade ETA prediction framework named DuETA. Specifically, we construct a congestion-sensitive graph based on the correlations of traffic patterns, and we develop a route-aware graph transformer to directly learn the long-distance correlations of the road segments. This design enables DuETA to capture the interactions between the road segment pairs that are spatially distant but highly correlated with traffic conditions. Extensive experiments are conducted on large-scale, real-world datasets collected from Baidu Maps. Experimental results show that ETA prediction can significantly benefit from the learned traffic congestion propagation patterns. In addition, DuETA has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps, serving billions of requests every day. This demonstrates that DuETA is an industrial-grade and robust solution for large-scale ETA prediction services.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

ERNIE-GeoL: A Geography-and-Language Pre-trained Model and its Applications in Baidu Maps

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a fundamental backbone for downstream tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. Despite initial gains that were obtained by applying generic PTMs to geo-related tasks at Baidu Maps, a clear performance plateau over time was observed. One of the main reasons for this plateau is the lack of readily available geographic knowledge in generic PTMs. To address this problem, in this paper, we present ERNIE-GeoL, which is a geography-and-language pre-trained model designed and developed for improving the geo-related tasks at Baidu Maps. ERNIE-GeoL is elaborately designed to learn a universal representation of geography-language by pre-training on large-scale data generated from a heterogeneous graph that contains abundant geographic knowledge. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of ERNIE-GeoL. ERNIE-GeoL has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps since April 2021, which significantly benefits the performance of various downstream tasks. This demonstrates that ERNIE-GeoL can serve as a fundamental backbone for a wide range of geo-related tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Simple and Effective Relation-based Embedding Propagation for Knowledge Representation Learning

Relational graph neural networks have garnered particular attention to encode graph context in knowledge graphs (KGs). Although they achieved competitive performance on small KGs, how to efficiently and effectively utilize graph context for large KGs remains an open problem. To this end, we propose the Relation-based Embedding Propagation (REP) method. It is a post-processing technique to adapt pre-trained KG embeddings with graph context. As relations in KGs are directional, we model the incoming head context and the outgoing tail context separately. Accordingly, we design relational context functions with no external parameters. Besides, we use averaging to aggregate context information, making REP more computation-efficient. We theoretically prove that such designs can avoid information distortion during propagation. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that REP has significant scalability while improving or maintaining prediction quality. Notably, it averagely brings about 10% relative improvement to triplet-based embedding methods on OGBL-WikiKG2 and takes 5%-83% time to achieve comparable results as the state-of-the-art GC-OTE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

ERNIE-SPARSE: Learning Hierarchical Efficient Transformer Through Regularized Self-Attention

Sparse Transformer has recently attracted a lot of attention since the ability for reducing the quadratic dependency on the sequence length. We argue that two factors, information bottleneck sensitivity and inconsistency between different attention topologies, could affect the performance of the Sparse Transformer. This paper proposes a well-designed model named ERNIE-Sparse. It consists of two distinctive parts: (i) Hierarchical Sparse Transformer (HST) to sequentially unify local and global information. (ii) Self-Attention Regularization (SAR) method, a novel regularization designed to minimize the distance for transformers with different attention topologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of ERNIE-Sparse, we perform extensive evaluations. Firstly, we perform experiments on a multi-modal long sequence modeling task benchmark, Long Range Arena (LRA). Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE-Sparse significantly outperforms a variety of strong baseline methods including the dense attention and other efficient sparse attention methods and achieves improvements by 2.77% (57.78% vs. 55.01%). Secondly, to further show the effectiveness of our method, we pretrain ERNIE-Sparse and verified it on 3 text classification and 2 QA downstream tasks, achieve improvements on classification benchmark by 0.83% (92.46% vs. 91.63%), on QA benchmark by 3.24% (74.67% vs. 71.43%). Experimental results continue to demonstrate its superior performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

ERNIE 3.0 Titan: Exploring Larger-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation

Pre-trained language models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. GPT-3 has shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can further exploit their enormous potential. A unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 was recently proposed for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models and trained a model with 10 billion parameters. ERNIE 3.0 outperformed the state-of-the-art models on various NLP tasks. In order to explore the performance of scaling up ERNIE 3.0, we train a hundred-billion-parameter model called ERNIE 3.0 Titan with up to 260 billion parameters on the PaddlePaddle platform. Furthermore, we design a self-supervised adversarial loss and a controllable language modeling loss to make ERNIE 3.0 Titan generate credible and controllable texts. To reduce the computation overhead and carbon emission, we propose an online distillation framework for ERNIE 3.0 Titan, where the teacher model will teach students and train itself simultaneously. ERNIE 3.0 Titan is the largest Chinese dense pre-trained model so far. Empirical results show that the ERNIE 3.0 Titan outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 68 NLP datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Graph4Rec: A Universal Toolkit with Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems

In recent years, owing to the outstanding performance in graph representation learning, graph neural network (GNN) techniques have gained considerable interests in many real-world scenarios, such as recommender systems and social networks. In recommender systems, the main challenge is to learn the effective user/item representations from their interactions. However, many recent publications using GNNs for recommender systems cannot be directly compared, due to their difference on datasets and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, many of them only provide a demo to conduct experiments on small datasets, which is far away to be applied in real-world recommender systems. To address this problem, we introduce Graph4Rec, a universal toolkit that unifies the paradigm to train GNN models into the following parts: graphs input, random walk generation, ego graphs generation, pairs generation and GNNs selection. From this training pipeline, one can easily establish his own GNN model with a few configurations. Besides, we develop a large-scale graph engine and a parameter server to support distributed GNN training. We conduct a systematic and comprehensive experiment to compare the performance of different GNN models on several scenarios in different scale. Extensive experiments are demonstrated to identify the key components of GNNs. We also try to figure out how the sparse and dense parameters affect the performance of GNNs. Finally, we investigate methods including negative sampling, ego graph construction order, and warm start strategy to find a more effective and efficient GNNs practice on recommender systems. Our toolkit is based on PGL https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PGL and the code is opened source in https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PGL/tree/main/apps/Graph4Rec.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

NOTE: Solution for KDD-CUP 2021 WikiKG90M-LSC

WikiKG90M in KDD Cup 2021 is a large encyclopedic knowledge graph, which could benefit various downstream applications such as question answering and recommender systems. Participants are invited to complete the knowledge graph by predicting missing triplets. Recent representation learning methods have achieved great success on standard datasets like FB15k-237. Thus, we train the advanced algorithms in different domains to learn the triplets, including OTE, QuatE, RotatE and TransE. Significantly, we modified OTE into NOTE (short for Norm-OTE) for better performance. Besides, we use both the DeepWalk and the post-smoothing technique to capture the graph structure for supplementation. In addition to the representations, we also use various statistical probabilities among the head entities, the relations and the tail entities for the final prediction. Experimental results show that the ensemble of state-of-the-art representation learning methods could draw on each others strengths. And we develop feature engineering from validation candidates for further improvements. Please note that we apply the same strategy on the test set for final inference. And these features may not be practical in the real world when considering ranking against all the entities.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation

Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

ERNIE-Tiny : A Progressive Distillation Framework for Pretrained Transformer Compression

Pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT adopt a training paradigm which first pretrain the model in general data and then finetune the model on task-specific data, and have recently achieved great success. However, PLMs are notorious for their enormous parameters and hard to be deployed on real-life applications. Knowledge distillation has been prevailing to address this problem by transferring knowledge from a large teacher to a much smaller student over a set of data. We argue that the selection of thee three key components, namely teacher, training data, and learning objective, is crucial to the effectiveness of distillation. We, therefore, propose a four-stage progressive distillation framework ERNIE-Tiny to compress PLM, which varies the three components gradually from general level to task-specific level. Specifically, the first stage, General Distillation, performs distillation with guidance from pretrained teacher, gerenal data and latent distillation loss. Then, General-Enhanced Distillation changes teacher model from pretrained teacher to finetuned teacher. After that, Task-Adaptive Distillation shifts training data from general data to task-specific data. In the end, Task-Specific Distillation, adds two additional losses, namely Soft-Label and Hard-Label loss onto the last stage. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and generalization gain brought by ERNIE-Tiny.In particular, experiments show that a 4-layer ERNIE-Tiny maintains over 98.0%performance of its 12-layer teacher BERT base on GLUE benchmark, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 1.0% GLUE score with the same amount of parameters. Moreover, ERNIE-Tiny achieves a new compression SOTA on five Chinese NLP tasks, outperforming BERT base by 0.4% accuracy with 7.5x fewer parameters and9.4x faster inference speed.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Masked Label Prediction: Unified Message Passing Model for Semi-Supervised Classification

Graph neural network (GNN) and label propagation algorithm (LPA) are both message passing algorithms, which have achieved superior performance in semi-supervised classification. GNN performs feature propagation by a neural network to make predictions, while LPA uses label propagation across graph adjacency matrix to get results. However, there is still no effective way to directly combine these two kinds of algorithms. To address this issue, we propose a novel Unified Message Passaging Model (UniMP) that can incorporate feature and label propagation at both training and inference time. First, UniMP adopts a Graph Transformer network, taking feature embedding and label embedding as input information for propagation. Second, to train the network without overfitting in self-loop input label information, UniMP introduces a masked label prediction strategy, in which some percentage of input label information are masked at random, and then predicted. UniMP conceptually unifies feature propagation and label propagation and is empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art semi-supervised classification results in Open Graph Benchmark (OGB).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

kk2018 at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Adversarial Training for Code-Mixing Sentiment Classification

Code switching is a linguistic phenomenon that may occur within a multilingual setting where speakers share more than one language. With the increasing communication between groups with different languages, this phenomenon is more and more popular. However, there are little research and data in this area, especially in code-mixing sentiment classification. In this work, the domain transfer learning from state-of-the-art uni-language model ERNIE is tested on the code-mixing dataset, and surprisingly, a strong baseline is achieved. Furthermore, the adversarial training with a multi-lingual model is used to achieve 1st place of SemEval-2020 Task 9 Hindi-English sentiment classification competition.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

ERNIE at SemEval-2020 Task 10: Learning Word Emphasis Selection by Pre-trained Language Model

This paper describes the system designed by ERNIE Team which achieved the first place in SemEval-2020 Task 10: Emphasis Selection For Written Text in Visual Media. Given a sentence, we are asked to find out the most important words as the suggestion for automated design. We leverage the unsupervised pre-training model and finetune these models on our task. After our investigation, we found that the following models achieved an excellent performance in this task: ERNIE 2.0, XLM-ROBERTA, ROBERTA and ALBERT. We combine a pointwise regression loss and a pairwise ranking loss which is more close to the final M atchm metric to finetune our models. And we also find that additional feature engineering and data augmentation can help improve the performance. Our best model achieves the highest score of 0.823 and ranks first for all kinds of metrics

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding

Recently, pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various language understanding tasks, which indicates that pre-training on large-scale corpora may play a crucial role in natural language processing. Current pre-training procedures usually focus on training the model with several simple tasks to grasp the co-occurrence of words or sentences. However, besides co-occurring, there exists other valuable lexical, syntactic and semantic information in training corpora, such as named entity, semantic closeness and discourse relations. In order to extract to the fullest extent, the lexical, syntactic and semantic information from training corpora, we propose a continual pre-training framework named ERNIE 2.0 which builds and learns incrementally pre-training tasks through constant multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERNIE 2.0 outperforms BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks including English tasks on GLUE benchmarks and several common tasks in Chinese. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration

We present a novel language representation model enhanced by knowledge called ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration). Inspired by the masking strategy of BERT, ERNIE is designed to learn language representation enhanced by knowledge masking strategies, which includes entity-level masking and phrase-level masking. Entity-level strategy masks entities which are usually composed of multiple words.Phrase-level strategy masks the whole phrase which is composed of several words standing together as a conceptual unit.Experimental results show that ERNIE outperforms other baseline methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results on five Chinese natural language processing tasks including natural language inference, semantic similarity, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and question answering. We also demonstrate that ERNIE has more powerful knowledge inference capacity on a cloze test.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Functional Hashing for Compressing Neural Networks

As the complexity of deep neural networks (DNNs) trend to grow to absorb the increasing sizes of data, memory and energy consumption has been receiving more and more attentions for industrial applications, especially on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel structure based on functional hashing to compress DNNs, namely FunHashNN. For each entry in a deep net, FunHashNN uses multiple low-cost hash functions to fetch values in the compression space, and then employs a small reconstruction network to recover that entry. The reconstruction network is plugged into the whole network and trained jointly. FunHashNN includes the recently proposed HashedNets as a degenerated case, and benefits from larger value capacity and less reconstruction loss. We further discuss extensions with dual space hashing and multi-hops. On several benchmark datasets, FunHashNN demonstrates high compression ratios with little loss on prediction accuracy.

cs.LG↗