Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly strong contenders in machine translation. In this work, we focus on document-level translation, where some words cannot be translated without context from outside the sentence. Specifically, we investigate the ability of prominent LLMs to utilize the document context during translation through a perturbation analysis (analyzing models’ robustness to perturbed and randomized document context) and an attribution analysis (examining the contribution of relevant context to the translation). We conduct an extensive evaluation across nine LLMs from diverse model families and training paradigms, including translation-specialized LLMs, alongside two encoder-decoder transformer baselines. We find that LLMs’ improved document-translation performance compared to encoder-decoder models is not reflected in pronoun translation performance. Our analysis highlight the need for context-aware finetuning of LLMs with a focus on relevant parts of the context to improve their reliability for document-level translation.

Associative memory models, such as Hopfield networks and their modern variants, have garnered renewed interest due to advancements in memory capacity and connections with self-attention in transformers. In this work, we introduce a unified framework-Hopfield-Fenchel-Young networks-which generalizes these models to a broader family of energy functions. Our energies are formulated as the difference between two Fenchel-Young losses: one, parameterized by a generalized entropy, defines the Hopfield scoring mechanism, while the other applies a post-transformation to the Hopfield output. By utilizing Tsallis and norm entropies, we derive end-to-end differentiable update rules that enable sparse transformations, uncovering new connections between loss margins, sparsity, and exact retrieval of single memory patterns. We further extend this framework to structured Hopfield networks using the SparseMAP transformation, allowing the retrieval of pattern associations rather than a single pattern. Our framework unifies and extends traditional and modern Hopfield networks and provides an energy minimization perspective for widely used post-transformations like $\ell_2$-normalization and layer normalization-all through suitable choices of Fenchel-Young losses and by using convex analysis as a building block. Finally, we validate our Hopfield-Fenchel-Young networks on diverse memory recall tasks, including free and sequential recall. Experiments on simulated data, image retrieval, multiple instance learning, and text rationalization demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Modern Hopfield networks have enjoyed recent interest due to their connection to attention in transformers. Our paper provides a unified framework for sparse Hopfield networks by establishing a link with Fenchel-Young losses. The result is a new family of Hopfield-Fenchel-Young energies whose update rules are end-to-end differentiable sparse transformations. We reveal a connection between loss margins, sparsity, and exact memory retrieval. We further extend this framework to structured Hopfield networks via the SparseMAP transformation, which can retrieve pattern associations instead of a single pattern. Experiments on multiple instance learning and text rationalization demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.

Despite the tremendous success of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), its performance on low- resource language pairs still remains subpar, partly due to the limited ability to handle previously unseen inputs, i.e., generalization. In this paper, we propose a method called Joint Dropout, that addresses the challenge of low-resource neural machine translation by substituting phrases with variables, resulting in significant enhancement of compositionality, which is a key aspect of generalization. We observe a substantial improvement in translation quality for language pairs with minimal resources, as seen in BLEU and Direct Assessment scores. Furthermore, we conduct an error analysis, and find Joint Dropout to also enhance generalizability of low-resource NMT in terms of robustness and adaptability across different domains.

Neural networks are powerful function estimators, leading to their status as a paradigm of choice for modeling structured data. However, unlike other structured representations that emphasize the modularity of the problem {–} e.g., factor graphs {–} neural networks are usually monolithic mappings from inputs to outputs, with a fixed computation order. This limitation prevents them from capturing different directions of computation and interaction between the modeled variables. In this paper, we combine the representational strengths of factor graphs and of neural networks, proposing undirected neural networks (UNNs): a flexible framework for specifying computations that can be performed in any order. For particular choices, our proposed models subsume and extend many existing architectures: feed-forward, recurrent, self-attention networks, auto-encoders, and networks with implicit layers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of undirected neural architectures, both unstructured and structured, on a range of tasks: tree-constrained dependency parsing, convolutional image classification, and sequence completion with attention. By varying the computation order, we show how a single UNN can be used both as a classifier and a prototype generator, and how it can fill in missing parts of an input sequence, making them a promising field for further research.

Exponential families are widely used in machine learning, including many distributions in continuous and discrete domains (e.g., Gaussian, Dirichlet, Poisson, and categorical distributions via the softmax transformation). Distributions in each of these families have fixed support. In contrast, for finite domains, recent work on sparse alternatives to softmax (e.g., sparsemax, $\alpha$-entmax, and fusedmax), has led to distributions with varying support. This paper develops sparse alternatives to continuous distributions, based on several technical contributions: First, we define $\Omega$-regularized prediction maps and Fenchel-Young losses for arbitrary domains (possibly countably infinite or continuous). For linearly parametrized families, we show that minimization of Fenchel-Young losses is equivalent to moment matching of the statistics, generalizing a fundamental property of exponential families. When $\Omega$ is a Tsallis negentropy with parameter $\alpha$, we obtain “deformed exponential families,” which include $\alpha$-entmax and sparsemax ($\alpha=2$) as particular cases. For quadratic energy functions, the resulting densities are $\beta$-Gaussians, an instance of elliptical distributions that contain as particular cases the Gaussian, biweight, triweight, and Epanechnikov densities, and for which we derive closed-form expressions for the variance, Tsallis entropy, and Fenchel-Young loss. When $\Omega$ is a total variation or Sobolev regularizer, we obtain a continuous version of the fusedmax. Finally, we introduce continuous-domain attention mechanisms, deriving efficient gradient backpropagation algorithms for $\alpha \in \{1,\frac{4}{3}, \frac{3}{2}, 2\}$. Using these algorithms, we demonstrate our sparse continuous distributions for attention-based audio classification and visual question answering, showing that they allow attending to time intervals and compact regions.

Visual attention mechanisms are widely used in multimodal tasks, as visual question answering (VQA). One drawback of softmax-based attention mechanisms is that they assign some probability mass to all image regions, regardless of their adjacency structure and of their relevance to the text. In this paper, to better link the image structure with the text, we replace the traditional softmax attention mechanism with two alternative sparsity-promoting transformations: sparsemax, which is able to select only the relevant regions (assigning zero weight to the rest), and a newly proposed Total-Variation Sparse Attention (TVMAX), which further encourages the joint selection of adjacent spatial locations. Experiments in VQA show gains in accuracy as well as higher similarity to human attention, which suggests better interpretability.

We address the problem of learning binary decision trees that partition data for some downstream task. We propose to learn discrete parameters (i.e., for tree traversals and node pruning) and continuous parameters (i.e., for tree split functions and prediction functions) simultaneously using argmin differentiation. We do so by sparsely relaxing a mixed-integer program for the discrete parameters, to allow gradients to pass through the program to continuous parameters. We derive customized algorithms to efficiently compute the forward and backward passes. This means that our tree learning procedure can be used as an (implicit) layer in arbitrary deep networks, and can be optimized with arbitrary loss functions. We demonstrate that our approach produces binary trees that are competitive with existing single tree and ensemble approaches, in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Further, apart from greedy approaches (which do not have competitive accuracies), our method is faster to train than all other tree-learning baselines we compare with.

Latent structure models are a powerful tool for modeling language data: they can mitigate the error propagation and annotation bottleneck in pipeline systems, while simultaneously uncovering linguistic insights about the data.One challenge with end-to-end training of these models is the argmax operation, which has null gradient.In this paper, we focus on surrogate gradients, a popular strategy to deal with this problem.We explore latent structure learning through the angle of pulling back the downstream learning objective.In this paradigm, we discover a principled motivation for both the straight-through estimator (STE) as well as the recently-proposed SPIGOT-a variant of STE for structured models.Our perspective leads to new algorithms in the same family.We empirically compare the known and the novel pulled-back estimators against the popular alternatives, yielding new insight for practitioners and revealing intriguing failure cases.

Structured predictors require solving a combinatorial optimization problem over a large number of structures, such as dependency trees or alignments. When embedded as structured hidden layers in a neural net, argmin differentiation and efficient gradient computation are further required. Recently, SparseMAP has been proposed as a differentiable, sparse alternative to maximum a posteriori (MAP) and marginal inference. SparseMAP returns an interpretable combination of a small number of structures; its sparsity being the key to efficient optimization. However, SparseMAP requires access to an exact MAP oracle in the structured model, excluding, e.g., loopy graphical models or logic constraints, which generally require approximate inference. In this paper, we introduce LP-SparseMAP, an extension of SparseMAP addressing this limitation via a local polytope relaxation. LP-SparseMAP uses the flexible and powerful language of factor graphs to define expressive hidden structures, supporting coarse decompositions, hard logic constraints, and higher-order correlations. We derive the forward and backward algorithms needed for using LP-SparseMAP as a structured hidden or output layer. Experiments in three structured tasks show benefits versus SparseMAP and Structured SVM.

Training neural network models with discrete (categorical or structured) latent variables can be computationally challenging, due to the need for marginalization over large or combinatorial sets. To circumvent this issue, one typically resorts to sampling-based approximations of the true marginal, requiring noisy gradient estimators (e.g., score function estimator) or continuous relaxations with lower-variance reparameterized gradients (e.g., Gumbel-Softmax). In this paper, we propose a new training strategy which replaces these estimators by an exact yet efficient marginalization. To achieve this, we parameterize discrete distributions over latent assignments using differentiable sparse mappings: sparsemax and its structured counterparts. In effect, the support of these distributions is greatly reduced, which enables efficient marginalization. We report successful results in three tasks covering a range of latent variable modeling applications: a semisupervised deep generative model, a latent communication game, and a generative model with a bit-vector latent representation. In all cases, we obtain good performance while still achieving the practicality of sampling-based approximations.

Exponential families are widely used in machine learning; they include many distributions in continuous and discrete domains (e.g., Gaussian, Dirichlet, Poisson, and categorical distributions via the softmax transformation). Distributions in each of these families have fixed support. In contrast, for finite domains, there has been recent work on sparse alternatives to softmax (e.g., sparsemax and alpha-entmax), which have varying support, being able to assign zero probability to irrelevant categories. These discrete sparse mappings have been used for improving interpretability of neural attention mechanisms. This paper expands that work in two directions: first, we extend alpha-entmax to continuous domains, revealing a link with Tsallis statistics and deformed exponential families. Second, we introduce continuous-domain attention mechanisms, deriving efficient gradient backpropagation algorithms for alpha in {1,2}. Experiments on attention-based text classification, machine translation, and visual question answering illustrate the use of continuous attention in 1D and 2D, showing that it allows attending to time intervals and compact regions.

Over the past decades, numerous loss functions have been been proposed for a variety of supervised learning tasks, including regression, classification, ranking, and more generally structured prediction. Understanding the core principles and theoretical properties underpinning these losses is key to choose the right loss for the right problem, as well as to create new losses which combine their strengths. In this paper, we introduce Fenchel-Young losses, a generic way to construct a convex loss function for a regularized prediction function. We provide an in-depth study of their properties in a very broad setting, covering all the aforementioned supervised learning tasks, and revealing new connections between sparsity, generalized entropies, and separation margins. We show that Fenchel-Young losses unify many well-known loss functions and allow to create useful new ones easily. Finally, we derive efficient predictive and training algorithms, making Fenchel-Young losses appealing both in theory and practice.

Sequence-to-sequence models are a powerful workhorse of NLP. Most variants employ a softmax transformation in both their attention mechanism and output layer, leading to dense alignments and strictly positive output probabilities. This density is wasteful, making models less interpretable and assigning probability mass to many implausible outputs. In this paper, we propose sparse sequence-to-sequence models, rooted in a new family of 𝛼-entmax transformations, which includes softmax and sparsemax as particular cases, and is sparse for any 𝛼 > 1. We provide fast algorithms to evaluate these transformations and their gradients, which scale well for large vocabulary sizes. Our models are able to produce sparse alignments and to assign nonzero probability to a short list of plausible outputs, sometimes rendering beam search exact. Experiments on morphological inflection and machine translation reveal consistent gains over dense models.

This paper studies Fenchel-Young losses, a generic way to construct convex loss functions from a regularization function. We analyze their properties in depth, showing that they unify many well-known loss functions and allow to create useful new ones easily. Fenchel-Young losses constructed from a generalized entropy, including the Shannon and Tsallis entropies, induce predictive probability distributions. We formulate conditions for a generalized entropy to yield losses with a separation margin, and probability distributions with sparse support. Finally, we derive efficient algorithms, making Fenchel-Young losses appealing both in theory and practice.

Gonçalo M. Correia, Vlad Niculae, André F. T. Martins. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Deep NLP models benefit from underlying structures in the data-e.g., parse treestypically extracted using off-the-shelf parsers.Recent attempts to jointly learn the latent structure encounter a tradeoff: either make factorization assumptions that limit expressiveness, or sacrifice end-to-end differentiability.Using the recently proposed SparseMAP inference, which retrieves a sparse distribution over latent structures, we propose a novel approach for end-to-end learning of latent structure predictors jointly with a downstream predictor.To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to enable unrestricted dynamic computation graph construction from the global latent structure, while maintaining differentiability.2016).Assigning the conjunction as head instead seems preferable in a Child-Sum TreeLSTM.

Structured prediction requires searching over a combinatorial number of structures. To tackle it, we introduce SparseMAP, a new method for sparse structured inference, together with corresponding loss functions. SparseMAP inference is able to automatically select only a few global structures: it is situated between MAP inference, which picks a single structure, and marginal inference, which assigns probability mass to all structures, including implausible ones. Importantly, SparseMAP can be computed using only calls to a MAP oracle, hence it is applicable even to problems where marginal inference is intractable, such as linear assignment. Moreover, thanks to the solution sparsity, gradient backpropagation is efficient regardless of the structure. SparseMAP thus enables us to augment deep neural networks with generic and sparse structured hidden layers. Experiments in dependency parsing and natural language inference reveal competitive accuracy, improved interpretability, and the ability to capture natural language ambiguities, which is attractive for pipeline systems.

We propose a novel factor graph model for argument mining, designed for settings in which the argumentative relations in a document do not necessarily form a tree structure.(This is the case in over 20% of the web comments dataset we release.)Our model jointly learns elementary unit type classification and argumentative relation prediction.Moreover, our model supports SVM and RNN parametrizations, can enforce structure constraints (e.g., transitivity), and can express dependencies between adjacent relations and propositions.Our approaches outperform unstructured baselines in both web comments and argumentative essay datasets.

Factorization machines and polynomial networks are supervised polynomial models based on an efficient low-rank decomposition. We extend these models to the multi-output setting, i.e., for learning vector-valued functions, with application to multi-class or multi-task problems. We cast this as the problem of learning a 3-way tensor whose slices share a common basis and propose a convex formulation of that problem. We then develop an efficient conditional gradient algorithm and prove its global convergence, despite the fact that it involves a non-convex basis selection step. On classification tasks, we show that our algorithm achieves excellent accuracy with much sparser models than existing methods. On recommendation system tasks, we show how to combine our algorithm with a reduction from ordinal regression to multi-output classification and show that the resulting algorithm outperforms simple baselines in terms of ranking accuracy.

Modern neural networks are often augmented with an attention mechanism, which tells the network where to focus within the input. We propose in this paper a new framework for sparse and structured attention, building upon a smoothed max operator. We show that the gradient of this operator defines a mapping from real values to probabilities, suitable as an attention mechanism. Our framework includes softmax and a slight generalization of the recently-proposed sparsemax as special cases. However, we also show how our framework can incorporate modern structured penalties, resulting in more interpretable attention mechanisms, that focus on entire segments or groups of an input. We derive efficient algorithms to compute the forward and backward passes of our attention mechanisms, enabling their use in a neural network trained with backpropagation. To showcase their potential as a drop-in replacement for existing ones, we evaluate our attention mechanisms on three large-scale tasks: textual entailment, machine translation, and sentence summarization. Our attention mechanisms improve interpretability without sacrificing performance; notably, on textual entailment and summarization, we outperform the standard attention mechanisms based on softmax and sparsemax.

Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves.While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are commonly seen as a way of reaching better decisions compared to solutions that do not require coordination between the individuals (e.g.voting)-through discussion, the sum becomes greater than the parts.However, this assumption is not irrefutable: anecdotal evidence of wasteful discussions abounds, and in our own experiments we find that over 30% of discussions are unproductive.We propose a framework for analyzing conversational dynamics in order to determine whether a given task-oriented discussion is worth having or not.We exploit conversational patterns reflecting the flow of ideas and the balance between the participants, as well as their linguistic choices.We apply this framework to conversations naturally occurring in an online collaborative world exploration game developed and deployed to support this research.Using this setting, we show that linguistic cues and conversational patterns extracted from the first 20 seconds of a team discussion are predictive of whether it will be a wasteful or a productive one.

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views. In this work, we study these interactions to understand the mechanisms behind persuasion.

Vlad Niculae, Srijan Kumar, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2015.

Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience. Outlets are often accused of exhibiting a systematic bias in this selection process, with different outlets portraying different versions of reality. However, in the absence of objective measures and empirical evidence, the direction and extent of systematicity remains widely disputed. In this paper we propose a framework based on quoting patterns for quantifying and characterizing the degree to which media outlets exhibit systematic bias. We apply this framework to a massive dataset of news articles spanning the six years of Obama's presidency and all of his speeches, and reveal that a systematic pattern does indeed emerge from the outlet's quoting behavior. Moreover, we show that this pattern can be successfully exploited in an unsupervised prediction setting, to determine which new quotes an outlet will select to broadcast. By encoding bias patterns in a low-rank space we provide an analysis of the structure of political media coverage. This reveals a latent media bias space that aligns surprisingly well with political ideology and outlet type. A linguistic analysis exposes striking differences across these latent dimensions, showing how the different types of media outlets portray different realities even when reporting on the same events. For example, outlets mapped to the mainstream conservative side of the latent space focus on quotes that portray a presidential persona disproportionately characterized by negativity.

Vlad Niculae, Marcos Zampieri, Liviu Dinu, Alina Maria Ciobanu. Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, volume 2: Short Papers. 2014.

Comparisons are common linguistic devices used to indicate the likeness of two things. Often, this likeness is not meant in the literal sense—for example, “I slept like a log” does not imply that logs actually sleep. In this paper we propose a computational study of figurative comparisons, or similes. Our starting point is a new large dataset of comparisons extracted from product reviews and annotated for figurativeness. We use this dataset to characterize figurative language in naturally occurring comparisons and reveal linguistic patterns indicative of this phenomenon. We operationalize these insights and apply them to a new task with high relevance to text understanding: distinguishing between figurative and literal comparisons. Finally, we apply this framework to explore the social context in which figurative language is produced, showing that similes are more likely to accompany opinions showing extreme sentiment, and that they are uncommon in reviews deemed helpful.