Related papers: Learning from Task Descriptions

Pre-trained text-to-text transformers such as BART have achieved impressive performance across a range of NLP tasks. Recent study further shows that they can learn to generalize to novel tasks, by including task descriptions as part of the…

Performance of NLP systems is typically evaluated by collecting a large-scale dataset by means of crowd-sourcing to train a data-driven model and evaluate it on a held-out portion of the data. This approach has been shown to suffer from…

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of…

While sentence simplification is an active research topic in NLP, its adjacent tasks of sentence complexification and same-level paraphrasing are not. To train models on all three tasks, we present two new unsupervised datasets. We compare…

The mainstream machine learning paradigms for NLP often work with two underlying presumptions. First, the target task is predefined and static; a system merely needs to learn to solve it exclusively. Second, the supervision of a task mainly…

Machine comprehension plays an essential role in NLP and has been widely explored with dataset like MCTest. However, this dataset is too simple and too small for learning true reasoning abilities. \cite{hermann2015teaching} therefore…

Characterizing the patterns of errors that a system makes helps researchers focus future development on increasing its accuracy and robustness. We propose a novel form of "meta learning" that automatically learns interpretable rules that…

Humans (e.g., crowdworkers) have a remarkable ability in solving different tasks, by simply reading textual instructions that define them and looking at a few examples. Despite the success of the conventional supervised learning on…

Traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. This paradigm seriously hinders the development of task generalization since preparing a task-specific example…

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written…

Some NLP tasks can be solved in a fully unsupervised fashion by providing a pretrained language model with "task descriptions" in natural language (e.g., Radford et al., 2019). While this approach underperforms its supervised counterpart,…

When a neural language model (LM) is adapted to perform a new task, what aspects of the task predict the eventual performance of the model? In NLP, systematic features of LM generalization to individual examples are well characterized, but…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various basic natural language tasks. For completing the complex task, we still need a plan for the task to guide LLMs to generate the specific solutions step by step. LLMs…

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks (e.g. question-answering in English) benefit from knowledge of other tasks (e.g. named entity recognition in English) and knowledge of other languages (e.g. question-answering in Spanish). Such shared…

In this work, we propose a novel robot learning framework called Neural Task Programming (NTP), which bridges the idea of few-shot learning from demonstration and neural program induction. NTP takes as input a task specification (e.g.,…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written…

To efficiently select optimal dataset combinations for enhancing multi-task learning (MTL) performance in large language models, we proposed a novel framework that leverages a neural network to predict the best dataset combinations. The…

Machine learning approaches applied to NLP are often evaluated by summarizing their performance in a single number, for example accuracy. Since most test sets are constructed as an i.i.d. sample from the overall data, this approach overly…

Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations - a paradigm known as in-context learning. We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations…

Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale…