Recent breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been driven by language models trained on a massive amount of plain text. While powerful, deriving supervision from textual resources is still an open question. For example, language model pretraining often neglects the rich, freely-available structures in textual data. In this thesis, we describe three lines of work that seek to improve the training and evaluation of neural models using naturally-occurring supervision. We first investigate self-supervised training losses to help enhance the performance of pretrained language models for various NLP tasks. Specifically, we alter the sentence prediction loss to make it better suited to other pretraining losses and more challenging to solve. We design an intermediate finetuning step that uses self-supervised training to promote models' ability in cross-task generalization. Then we describe methods to leverage the structures in Wikipedia and paraphrases. In particular, we propose training losses to exploit hyperlinks, article structures, and article category graphs for entity-, discourse-, entailment-related knowledge. We propose a framework that uses paraphrase pairs to disentangle semantics and syntax in sentence representations. We extend the framework for a novel generation task that controls the syntax of output text with a sentential exemplar. Lastly, we discuss our work on tailoring textual resources for establishing challenging evaluation tasks. We introduce three datasets by defining novel tasks using various fan-contributed websites, including a long-form data-to-text generation dataset, a screenplay summarization dataset, and a long-form story generation dataset. These datasets have unique characteristics offering challenges to future work in their respective task settings.

Multi-modal data abounds in biomedicine, such as radiology images and reports. Interpreting this data at scale is essential for improving clinical care and accelerating clinical research. Biomedical text with its complex semantics poses additional challenges in vision--language modelling compared to the general domain, and previous work has used insufficiently adapted models that lack domain-specific language understanding. In this paper, we show that principled textual semantic modelling can substantially improve contrastive learning in self-supervised vision--language processing. We release a language model that achieves state-of-the-art results in radiology natural language inference through its improved vocabulary and novel language pretraining objective leveraging semantics and discourse characteristics in radiology reports. Further, we propose a self-supervised joint vision--language approach with a focus on better text modelling. It establishes new state of the art results on a wide range of publicly available benchmarks, in part by leveraging our new domain-specific language model. We release a new dataset with locally-aligned phrase grounding annotations by radiologists to facilitate the study of complex semantic modelling in biomedical vision--language processing. A broad evaluation, including on this new dataset, shows that our contrastive learning approach, aided by textual-semantic modelling, outperforms prior methods in segmentation tasks, despite only using a global-alignment objective.

Sparsely Mixture of Experts (MoE) has received great interest due to its promising scaling capability with affordable computational overhead. MoE converts dense layers into sparse experts, and utilizes a gated routing network to make experts conditionally activated. However, as the number of experts grows, MoE with outrageous parameters suffers from overfitting and sparse data allocation. Such problems are especially severe on tasks with limited data, thus hindering the progress for MoE models to improve performance by scaling up. In this work, we propose Mixture of Expert Clusters - a general approach to enable expert layers to learn more diverse and appropriate knowledge by imposing variance-based constraints on the routing stage. We further propose a cluster-level expert dropout strategy specifically designed for the expert cluster structure. Our experiments reveal that MoEC could improve performance on machine translation and natural language understanding tasks, and raise the performance upper bound for scaling up experts under limited data. We also verify that MoEC plays a positive role in mitigating overfitting and sparse data allocation.

Amazon has introduced the latest version of their Sockeye toolkit for the efficient training of stronger and faster neural machine translation (NMT) models. Sockeye 3 achieves speeds up to 126 percent faster than other PyTorch implementations on GPUs and up to 292 percent faster on CPUs.

The latest buzzword in the business world is machine learning. Machine learning has captured the imagination of many, conjuring up images of futuristic self-learning AIs and robots. Machine learning has opened up new avenues for technology and tools in the industry that were impossible just a few years ago. It powers breakthrough innovations, from prediction engines to online streaming TV live streaming, that supports modern lifestyles. Before we dive into the different machine learning applications, let's first understand What Machine learning is.

We introduce a new distributed policy gradient algorithm and show that it outperforms existing reward-aware training procedures such as REINFORCE, minimum risk training (MRT) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) in terms of training stability and generalization performance when optimizing machine translation models. Our algorithm, which we call MAD (on account of using the mean absolute deviation in the importance weighting calculation), has distributed data generators sampling multiple candidates per source sentence on worker nodes, while a central learner updates the policy. MAD depends crucially on two variance reduction strategies: (1) a conditional reward normalization method that ensures each source sentence has both positive and negative reward translation examples and (2) a new robust importance weighting scheme that acts as a conditional entropy regularizer. Experiments on a variety of translation tasks show that policies learned using the MAD algorithm perform very well when using both greedy decoding and beam search, and that the learned policies are sensitive to the specific reward used during training.

Noisy channel models have been especially effective in neural machine translation (NMT). However, recent approaches like "beam search and rerank" (BSR) incur significant computation overhead during inference, making real-world application infeasible. We aim to study if it is possible to build an amortized noisy channel NMT model such that when we do greedy decoding during inference, the translation accuracy matches that of BSR in terms of reward (based on the source-to-target log probability and the target-to-source log probability) and quality (based on BLEU and BLEURT). We attempt three approaches to train the new model: knowledge distillation, one-step-deviation imitation learning, and Q learning. The first approach obtains the noisy channel signal from a pseudo-corpus, and the latter two approaches aim to optimize toward a noisy-channel MT reward directly. For all three approaches, the generated translations fail to achieve rewards comparable to BSR, but the translation quality approximated by BLEU and BLEURT is similar to the quality of BSR-produced translations. Additionally, all three approaches speed up inference by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

There are several possibilities when one wants to quickly translate something into another language. The Google Translator is possibly the most famous solution herefore. But besides that there are some good alternatives like DeepL, which according to some sources is supposed to be the best translator online [1][2][3].

Reliable evaluation benchmarks designed for replicability and comprehensiveness have driven progress in machine learning. Due to the lack of a multilingual benchmark, however, vision-and-language research has mostly focused on English language tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce the Image-Grounded Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark. IGLUE brings together - by both aggregating pre-existing datasets and creating new ones - visual question answering, cross-modal retrieval, grounded reasoning, and grounded entailment tasks across 20 diverse languages. Our benchmark enables the evaluation of multilingual multimodal models for transfer learning, not only in a zero-shot setting, but also in newly defined few-shot learning setups. Based on the evaluation of the available state-of-the-art models, we find that translate-test transfer is superior to zero-shot transfer and that few-shot learning is hard to harness for many tasks. Moreover, downstream performance is partially explained by the amount of available unlabelled textual data for pretraining, and only weakly by the typological distance of target-source languages. We hope to encourage future research efforts in this area by releasing the benchmark to the community.

What if you didn't need English to translate? Meta's new and improved open source AI model'NLLB-200' is capable of translating 200 languages without English! "Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work it's improving everything we do--from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram, to recommending more relevant ads, to keeping our services safe for everyone", says Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta. Accessibility through language ensures that the benefits of the advancement of technology reach everyone, no matter what language they may speak. Tech companies are assuming a proactive role in attempting to bridge this gap.