Modern deep learning systems are increasingly deployed in situations such as personalization and federated learning where it is necessary to support i) learning on small amounts of data, and ii) communication efficient distributed training protocols. In this work, we develop FiLM Transfer (FiT) which fulfills these requirements in the image classification setting by combining ideas from transfer learning (fixed pretrained backbones and fine-tuned FiLM adapter layers) and meta-learning (automatically configured Naive Bayes classifiers and episodic training) to yield parameter efficient models with superior classification accuracy at low-shot. The resulting parameter efficiency is key for enabling few-shot learning, inexpensive model updates for personalization, and communication efficient federated learning. We experiment with FiT on a wide range of downstream datasets and show that it achieves better classification accuracy than the leading Big Transfer (BiT) algorithm at low-shot and achieves state-of-the art accuracy on the challenging VTAB-1k benchmark, with fewer than 1% of the updateable parameters. Finally, we demonstrate the parameter efficiency and superior accuracy of FiT in distributed low-shot applications including model personalization and federated learning where model update size is an important performance metric.

In this work, we provide a literature review of active learning (AL) for its applications in natural language processing (NLP). In addition to a fine-grained categorization of query strategies, we also investigate several other important aspects of applying AL to NLP problems. These include AL for structured prediction tasks, annotation cost, model learning (especially Figure 1: Counts of AL (left) and "neural" (right) papers with deep neural models), and starting in the ACL Anthology over the past twenty years.

We demonstrate the potential of few-shot translation systems, trained with unpaired language data, for both high and low-resource language pairs. We show that with only 5 examples of high-quality translation data shown at inference, a transformer decoder-only model trained solely with self-supervised learning, is able to match specialized supervised state-of-the-art models as well as more general commercial translation systems. In particular, we outperform the best performing system on the WMT'21 English - Chinese news translation task by only using five examples of English - Chinese parallel data at inference. Moreover, our approach in building these models does not necessitate joint multilingual training or back-translation, is conceptually simple and shows the potential to extend to the multilingual setting. Furthermore, the resulting models are two orders of magnitude smaller than state-of-the-art language models. We then analyze the factors which impact the performance of few-shot translation systems, and highlight that the quality of the few-shot demonstrations heavily determines the quality of the translations generated by our models. Finally, we show that the few-shot paradigm also provides a way to control certain attributes of the translation -- we show that we are able to control for regional varieties and formality using only a five examples at inference, paving the way towards controllable machine translation systems.

Our model can generate high-quality translation outputs using both text and image conditions. More results can be found in the experiment section. Diffusion-based image translation guided by semantic texts or a single target image has enabled flexible style transfer which is not limited to the specific domains. Unfortunately, due to the stochastic nature of diffusion models, it is often difficult to maintain the original content of the image during the reverse diffusion. To address this, here we present a novel diffusion-based unsupervised image translation method, dubbed as DiffuseIT, using disentangled style and content representation. Specifically, inspired by the slicing Vision Transformer (Tumanyan et al., 2022), we extract intermediate keys of multihead self attention layer from ViT model and used them as the content preservation loss. Then, an image guided style transfer is performed by matching the [CLS] classification token from the denoised samples and target image, whereas additional CLIP loss is used for the text-driven style transfer. To further accelerate the semantic change during the reverse diffusion, we also propose a novel semantic divergence loss and resampling strategy. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in both text-guided and image-guided translation tasks. Image translation is a task in which the model receives an input image and converts it into a target domain. Early image translation approaches (Zhu et al., 2017; Park et al., 2020; Isola et al., 2017) were mainly designed for single domain translation, but soon extended to multi-domain translation (Choi et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2019).

Technology has increasingly become an integral part of the Bible translation process. Over time, both the translation process and relevant technology have evolved greatly. More recently, the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made great progress in solving some problems previously thought impenetrable. Through this study we endeavor to better understand and communicate about a segment of the current landscape of the Bible translation process as it relates to technology and identify pertinent issues. We conduct several interviews with individuals working in different levels of the Bible translation process from multiple organizations to identify gaps and bottlenecks where technology (including recent advances in AI) could potentially play a pivotal role in reducing translation time and improving overall quality.

This study investigates the use of Visually Grounded Speech (VGS) models for keyword localisation in speech. The study focusses on two main research questions: (1) Is keyword localisation possible with VGS models and (2) Can keyword localisation be done cross-lingually in a real low-resource setting? Four methods for localisation are proposed and evaluated on an English dataset, with the best-performing method achieving an accuracy of 57%. A new dataset containing spoken captions in Yoruba language is also collected and released for cross-lingual keyword localisation. The cross-lingual model obtains a precision of 16% in actual keyword localisation and this performance can be improved by initialising from a model pretrained on English data. The study presents a detailed analysis of the model's success and failure modes and highlights the challenges of using VGS models for keyword localisation in low-resource settings.

Nowadays, many researchers are focusing their attention on the subject of machine translation (MT). However, Persian machine translation has remained unexplored despite a vast amount of research being conducted in languages with high resources, such as English. Moreover, while a substantial amount of research has been undertaken in statistical machine translation for some datasets in Persian, there is currently no standard baseline for transformer-based text2text models on each corpus. This study collected and analysed the most popular and valuable parallel corpora, which were used for Persian-English translation. Furthermore, we fine-tuned and evaluated two state-of-the-art attention-based seq2seq models on each dataset separately (48 results). We hope this paper will assist researchers in comparing their Persian to English and vice versa machine translation results Figure 1: Transformer model architecture to a standard baseline.

Transformers have achieved great success in machine translation, but transformer-based NMT models often require millions of bilingual parallel corpus for training. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture named as attention link (AL) to help improve transformer models' performance, especially in low training resources. We theoretically demonstrate the superiority of our attention link architecture in low training resources. Besides, we have done a large number of experiments, including en-de, de-en, en-fr, en-it, it-en, en-ro translation tasks on the IWSLT14 dataset as well as real low resources scene on bn-gu and gu-ta translation tasks on the CVIT PIB dataset. All the experiment results show our attention link is powerful and can lead to a significant improvement. In addition, we achieve a 37.9 BLEU score, a new sota, on the IWSLT14 de-en task by combining our attention link and other advanced methods.

We study the selection of transfer languages for different Natural Language Processing tasks, specifically sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and dependency parsing. In order to select an optimal transfer language, we propose to utilize different linguistic similarity metrics to measure the distance between languages and make the choice of transfer language based on this information instead of relying on intuition. We demonstrate that linguistic similarity correlates with cross-lingual transfer performance for all of the proposed tasks. We also show that there is a statistically significant difference in choosing the optimal language as the transfer source instead of English. This allows us to select a more suitable transfer language which can be used to better leverage knowledge from high-resource languages in order to improve the performance of language applications lacking data. For the study, we used datasets from eight different languages from three language families.

Previous work suggests that performance of cross-lingual information retrieval correlates highly with the quality of Machine Translation. However, there may be a threshold beyond which improving query translation quality yields little or no benefit to further improve the retrieval performance. This threshold may depend upon multiple factors including the source and target languages, the existing MT system quality and the search pipeline. In order to identify the benefit of improving an MT system for a given search pipeline, we investigate the sensitivity of retrieval quality to the presence of different levels of MT quality using experimental datasets collected from actual traffic. We systematically improve the performance of our MT systems quality on language pairs as measured by MT evaluation metrics including Bleu and Chrf to determine their impact on search precision metrics and extract signals that help to guide the improvement strategies. Using this information we develop techniques to compare query translations for multiple language pairs and identify the most promising language pairs to invest and improve.