Adams Wei Yu
I am a research scientist at Google Brain and a core member of Bard team. I work on large language models and multimodality.
Previously I got my PhD from MLD of CMU.
My work has significantly contributed to Bard, PaLM API, Youtube and Waymo. In the meantime, I also pursue state-of-the-art research. Please see my homepage for more information.
My work has significantly contributed to Bard, PaLM API, Youtube and Waymo. In the meantime, I also pursue state-of-the-art research. Please see my homepage for more information.
Authored Publications
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Sparsely Activated Language Models are Efficient In-Context Learners
Barret Richard Zoph
Dmitry (Dima) Lepikhin
Emma Wang
Kathy Meier-Hellstern
Kun Zhang
Liam B. Fedus
Maarten Paul Bosma
Marie Pellat
Maxim Krikun
Nan Du
Simon Tong
Tao Wang
Toju Duke
Yuanzhong Xu
Zongwei Zhou
(2022)
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Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong performance on few-shot learning. However, training these large dense models require significant amounts of computing resources. In this paper, we develop a family of sparsely activated mixture-of-expert language models named \glam (\textbf{G}eneralist \textbf{La}nguage \textbf{M}odel), which can have many more parameters but require significant less training cost than dense models. The largest \glam has 1.2 trillion parameters, which is approximately 7x larger than GPT-3 but can be trained more efficiently. With only 1/3 of energy consumption to train GPT-3, \glam achieves better overall performance on 29 zero-shot and one-shot NLP tasks. For example, \glam gets 75.0\% one-shot exact match accuracy on the TriviaQA test server, a significant improvement over 68.0\% obtained by GPT-3.
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With recent progress in joint modeling of visual and textual representations, Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on many multimodal downstream tasks. However, the requirement for expensive annotations including clean image captions and regional labels limits the scalability of existing approaches, and complicates the pretraining procedure with the introduction of multiple dataset-specific objectives. In this work, we relax these constraints and present a minimalist pretraining framework, named Simple Visual Language Model (SimVLM). Unlike prior work, SimVLM reduces the training complexity by exploiting large-scale weak supervision, and is trained end-to-end with a single prefix language modeling objective. Without utilizing extra data or task-specific customization, the resulting model significantly outperforms previous pretraining methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of discriminative and generative vision-language benchmarks, including VQA (+3.74% vqa-score), NLVR2 (+1.17% accuracy), SNLI-VE (+1.37% accuracy) and image captioning tasks (+10.1% average CIDEr score). Furthermore, we demonstrate that SimVLM acquires strong generalization and transfer ability, enabling zero-shot behavior including open-ended visual question answering and cross-modality transfer.
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Finetuned Language Models are Zero-Shot Learners
Jason Wei
Maarten Paul Bosma
Vincent Zhao
Nan Du
International Conference on Learning Representations (2022)
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This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models.
We show that instruction tuning---finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions---substantially boosts zero-shot performance on unseen tasks.
We take a 137B parameter pretrained language model and instruction-tune it on over 60 NLP tasks verbalized via natural language instruction templates. We evaluate this instruction-tuned model, which we call FLAN, on unseen task types. FLAN substantially improves the performance of its unmodified counterpart and surpasses zero-shot 175B GPT-3 on 20 of 25 tasks that we evaluate. FLAN even outperforms few-shot GPT-3 by a large margin on ANLI, RTE, BoolQ, AI2-ARC, OpenbookQA, and StoryCloze. Ablation studies reveal that number of tasks and model scale are key components to the success of instruction tuning.
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Extracting informative representations of molecules using Graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in AI-driven drug discovery. Recently, the graph research community has been trying to replicate the success of self-supervised pretraining in natural language processing, with several successes claimed. However, we find the benefit brought by self-supervised pretraining on small molecular data can be negligible in many cases. We conduct thorough ablation studies on the key components of GNN pretraining, including pretraining objectives, data splitting methods, input features, pretraining dataset scales, and GNN architectures, to see how they affect the accuracy of the downstream tasks. Our first important finding is, self-supervised graph pretraining do not always have statistically significant advantages over non-pretraining methods in many settings. Secondly, although noticeable improvement can be observed with additional supervised pretraining, the improvement may diminish with richer features or more balanced data splits. Thirdly, hyper-parameters could have larger impacts on accuracy of downstream tasks than the choice of pretraining tasks, especially when the scales of downstream tasks are small. Finally, we provide our conjectures where the complexity of some pretraining methods on small molecules might be insufficient, followed by empirical evidences on different pretraining datasets.
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AutoHAS: Efficient Hyperparameter and Architecture Search
Xuanyi Dong
Daiyi Peng
Bogdan Gabrys
Workshop on Neural Architecture Search at International Conference on Learning Representations (NAS@ICLR) (2021)
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Efficient hyperparameter or architecture search methods have shown remarkable results, but each of them is only applicable to searching for either hyperparameters (HPs) or architectures. In this work, we propose a unified pipeline, AutoHAS, to efficiently search for both architectures and hyperparameters. AutoHAS learns to alternately update the shared network weights and a reinforcement learning (RL) controller, which learns the probability distribution for the architecture candidates and HP candidates. A temporary weight is introduced to store the updated weight from the selected HPs (by the controller), and a validation accuracy based on this temporary weight serves as a reward to update the controller. In experiments, we show AutoHAS is efficient and generalizable to different search spaces, baselines and datasets. In particular, AutoHAS can improve the accuracy over popular network architectures, such as ResNet and EfficientNet, on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and four more other datasets.
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Current end-to-end Q&A models are primarily based on recurrent neural networks with attention. Despite their success, these models are often slow for both training and inference. We propose a novel Q&A model that does not require recurrent networks yet achieves equivalent or better performance than existing models. Our model is simple in that it consists exclusively of attention and convolutions. We present a thorough study of architectural choices that improve the accuracy of this simple model.
We also propose a novel data augmentation technique that not only enhances the training examples but also diversifies the phrasing of the sentences. It results in immediate improvement in the accuracy. This technique is of independent interest that it can be readily applied to other natural language processing tasks.
On the SQuAD dataset, our model is 3x faster in training and 10x faster in inference. The model achieves 82.2 F1 score on the development set, which is on par with best documented result of 81.8.
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