Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a crucial task in information extraction and sentiment analysis, aiming to identify aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. However, existing ABSA datasets are predominantly English-centric, limiting the scope for multilingual evaluation and research. To bridge this gap, we present M-ABSA, a comprehensive dataset spanning 7 domains and 21 languages, making it the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. Our primary focus is on triplet extraction, which involves identifying aspect terms, aspect categories, and sentiment polarities. The dataset is constructed through an automatic translation process with human review to ensure quality. We perform extensive experiments using various baselines to assess performance and compatibility on M-ABSA. Our empirical findings highlight that the dataset enables diverse evaluation tasks, such as multilingual and multi-domain transfer learning, and large language model evaluation, underscoring its inclusivity and its potential to drive advancements in multilingual ABSA research.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), a sequence labeling task, has attracted increasing attention in multilingual contexts. While previous research has focused largely on fine-tuning or training models specifically for ABSA, we evaluate large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot conditions to explore their potential to tackle this challenge with minimal task-specific adaptation. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of a series of LLMs on multilingual ABSA tasks, investigating various prompting strategies, including vanilla zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), self-improvement, self-debate, and self-consistency, across nine different models. Results indicate that while LLMs show promise in handling multilingual ABSA, they generally fall short of fine-tuned, task-specific models. Notably, simpler zero-shot prompts often outperform more complex strategies, especially in high-resource languages like English. These findings underscore the need for further refinement of LLM-based approaches to effectively address ABSA task across diverse languages.

Visual deep reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to acquire skills from visual input for unstructured tasks. However, current algorithms suffer from low sample efficiency, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we present MENTOR, a method that improves both the architecture and optimization of RL agents. Specifically, MENTOR replaces the standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with a mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, enhancing the agent's ability to handle complex tasks by leveraging modular expert learning to avoid gradient conflicts. Furthermore, MENTOR introduces a task-oriented perturbation mechanism, which heuristically samples perturbation candidates containing task-relevant information, leading to more targeted and effective optimization. MENTOR outperforms stateof-the-art methods across three simulation domains--DeepMind Control Suite, Meta-World, and Adroit. Additionally, MENTOR achieves an average of 83% success rate on three challenging real-world robotic manipulation tasks including Peg Insertion, Cable Routing, and Tabletop Golf, which significantly surpasses the success rate of 32% from the current strongest model-free visual RL algorithm. These results underscore the importance of sample efficiency in advancing visual RL for real-world robotics. Experimental videos are available at mentor. Figure 1: MENTOR is validated in real-world tasks. We design three challenging robotic learning tasks for the agent to acquire skills through real-world visual reinforcement learning. MENTOR achieves the most efficient and robust policies compared to the baselines. Despite substantial progress in this field (Kostrikov et al., 2020; Yarats et al., 2021; Schwarzer et al., 2020; Stooke et al., 2021; Laskin et al., 2020a), these methods still suffer from low sample efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, primarily due to their in-context learning ability. This ability could be applied to building babylike models, i.e. models at small scales, improving training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a "CoThought" pipeline, which efficiently trains smaller "baby" language models (BabyLMs) by leveraging the Chain of Thought prompting of LLMs. Our pipeline restructures a dataset of less than 100M in size using GPT-3.5-turbo, transforming it into task-oriented, human-readable texts that are comparable to the school texts for language learners. The BabyLM is then pretrained on this restructured dataset in a RoBERTa fashion. In evaluations across 4 benchmarks, our BabyLM outperforms the vanilla RoBERTa in 10 linguistic, NLU, and question-answering tasks by more than 3 points, showing a superior ability to extract contextual information. These results suggest that compact LMs pretrained on small, LLM-restructured data can better understand tasks and achieve improved performance.

Large Language Models have excelled in remarkable reasoning capabilities with advanced prompting techniques, but they fall short on tasks that require exploration, strategic foresight, and sequential decision-making. Recent works propose to utilize external programs to define search logic, such that LLMs can perform passive tree search to solve more challenging reasoning tasks. Though impressive results have been achieved, there are several fundamental limitations of these approaches. First, passive tree searches are not efficient as they usually require multiple rounds of LLM API calls to solve one single problem. Moreover, passive search methods are not flexible since they need task-specific program designs. Then a natural question arises: can we maintain the tree-search capability of LLMs without the aid of external programs, and can still generate responses that clearly demonstrate the process of a tree-structure search? To this end, we propose a new concept called autonomous tree-search ability of LLM, which can automatically generate a response containing search trajectories for the correct answer. Concretely, we perform search trajectories using capable LLM API via a fixed system prompt, allowing them to perform autonomous tree-search (ATS) right out of the box. Experiments on 4 puzzle games demonstrate our method can achieve huge improvements. The ATS-BFS method outperforms the Chain of Thought approach by achieving an average accuracy improvement of 33%. Compared to Tree of Thoughts, it requires 65.6% or 47.7% less GPT-api cost to attain a comparable level of accuracy. Moreover, we have collected data using the ATS prompt method and fine-tuned LLaMA. This approach yield a greater improvement compared to the ones fine-tuned on CoT data. Specifically, it outperforms CoT-tuned LLaMAs by an average of 40.6% and 38.5% for LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B, respectively.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results. However, existing models are expensive to train and deploy, and it is also difficult to expand their knowledge beyond pre-training data without forgetting previous knowledge. This paper proposes a new neural network architecture, ModuleFormer, that leverages modularity to improve the efficiency and flexibility of large language models. ModuleFormer is based on the Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE). Unlike the previous SMoE-based modular language model, which requires domain-labeled data to learn domain-specific experts, ModuleFormer can induce modularity from uncurated data with its new load balancing and concentration losses. ModuleFormer is a modular architecture that includes two different types of modules: new stick-breaking attention heads and feedforward experts. Different modules are sparsely activated conditions on the input token during training and inference. In our experiment, we found that the modular architecture enables three important abilities for large pre-trained language models: 1) Efficiency, since ModuleFormer only activates a subset of its modules for each input token, thus it could achieve the same performance as dense LLMs with more than two times throughput; 2) Extendability, ModuleFormer is more immune to catastrophic forgetting than dense LLMs and can be easily extended with new modules to learn new knowledge that is not included in the training data; 3) Specialisation, finetuning ModuleFormer could specialize a subset of modules to the finetuning task and the task-unrelated modules could be easily pruned for a lightweight deployment.

The goal of automated feature generation is to liberate machine learning experts from the laborious task of manual feature generation, which is crucial for improving the learning performance of tabular data. The major challenge in automated feature generation is to efficiently and accurately identify effective features from a vast pool of candidate features. In this paper, we present OpenFE, an automated feature generation tool that provides competitive results against machine learning experts. OpenFE achieves high efficiency and accuracy with two components: 1) a novel feature boosting method for accurately evaluating the incremental performance of candidate features and 2) a two-stage pruning algorithm that performs feature pruning in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets show that OpenFE outperforms existing baseline methods by a large margin. We further evaluate OpenFE in two Kaggle competitions with thousands of data science teams participating. In the two competitions, features generated by OpenFE with a simple baseline model can beat 99.3% and 99.6% data science teams respectively. In addition to the empirical results, we provide a theoretical perspective to show that feature generation can be beneficial in a simple yet representative setting. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhangTP1996/OpenFE.

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLM-Sim, a new language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLM-Sim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) has achieved remarkable success in a wide variety of applications. The split finding algorithm, which determines the tree construction process, is one of the most crucial components of GBDT. However, the split finding algorithm has long been criticized for its bias towards features with a large number of potential splits. This bias introduces severe interpretability and overfitting issues in GBDT. To this end, we provide a fine-grained analysis of bias in GBDT and demonstrate that the bias originates from 1) the systematic bias in the gain estimation of each split and 2) the bias in the split finding algorithm resulting from the use of the same data to evaluate the split improvement and determine the best split. Based on the analysis, we propose unbiased gain, a new unbiased measurement of gain importance using out-of-bag samples. Moreover, we incorporate the unbiased property into the split finding algorithm and develop UnbiasedGBM to solve the overfitting issue of GBDT. We assess the performance of UnbiasedGBM and unbiased gain in a large-scale empirical study comprising 60 datasets and show that: 1) UnbiasedGBM exhibits better performance than popular GBDT implementations such as LightGBM, XGBoost, and Catboost on average on the 60 datasets and 2) unbiased gain achieves better average performance in feature selection than popular feature importance methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/ZheyuAqaZhang/UnbiasedGBM.

Task-oriented dialog(TOD) aims to assist users in achieving specific goals through multi-turn conversation. Recently, good results have been obtained based on large pre-trained models. However, the labeled-data scarcity hinders the efficient development of TOD systems at scale. In this work, we constructed a weakly supervised dataset based on a teacher/student paradigm that leverages a large collection of unlabelled dialogues. Furthermore, we built a modular dialogue system and integrated coarse-to-fine grained classification for user intent detection. Experiments show that our method can reach the dialog goal with a higher success rate and generate more coherent responses.