Zhifeng Chen

Zhifeng Chen

Authored Publications
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    Noise2Music: Text-conditioned Music Generation with Diffusion Models
    Qingqing Huang
    Daniel S. Park
    Tao Wang
    Nanxin Chen
    Zhengdong Zhang
    Zhishuai Zhang
    Jiahui Yu
    Christian Frank
    William Chan
    Wei Han
    (2023)
    Preview abstract We introduce Noise2Music, where a series of diffusion models are trained to generate high-quality 30-second music clips from text prompts. Two types of diffusion models, a generator model, which generates an intermediate representation conditioned on text, and a cascader model, which generates high-fidelity audio conditioned on the intermediate representation and possibly the text, are trained and utilized in succession to generate high-fidelity music. We explore two options for the intermediate representation, one in which it is a spectrogram and the other in which it is audio with lower fidelity. We find that the generated audio is able to faithfully reflect key elements of the text prompt such as genre, mood, tempo and instruments. Language models play a key role in this story---they are used to generate paired text for the audio of the training set and to extract embeddings of the text prompts ingested by the diffusion models. View details
    Preview abstract The development of language models have moved from encoder-decoder to decoder-only designs. In addition, the common knowledge has it that the two most popular multimodal tasks, the generative and contrastive tasks, tend to conflict with one another, are hard to accommodate in one architecture, and further need complex adaptations for downstream tasks. We propose a novel paradigm of training with a decoder-only model for multimodal tasks, which is surprisingly effective in jointly learning of these disparate vision-language tasks. This is done with a simple model, called MaMMUT. It consists of a single vision encoder and a text decoder, and is able to accommodate contrastive and generative learning by a novel two-pass approach on the text decoder. We demonstrate that joint learning of these diverse objectives is simple, effective, and maximizes the weight-sharing of the model across these tasks. Furthermore, the same architecture enables straightforward extensions to open-vocabulary object detection and video-language tasks. The model tackles a diverse range of tasks, while being modest in capacity. Our model achieves the state of the art on image-text and text-image retrieval, video question answering and open-vocabulary detection tasks, outperforming much larger and more extensively trained foundational models. It shows very competitive results on VQA and Video Captioning, especially considering its capacity. Ablations confirm the flexibility and advantages of our approach. View details
    LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications
    Aaron Daniel Cohen
    Alena Butryna
    Alicia Jin
    Apoorv Kulshreshtha
    Ben Zevenbergen
    Chung-ching Chang
    Cosmo Du
    Daniel De Freitas Adiwardana
    Dehao Chen
    Dmitry (Dima) Lepikhin
    Erin Hoffman-John
    Igor Krivokon
    James Qin
    Jamie Hall
    Joe Fenton
    Johnny Soraker
    Maarten Paul Bosma
    Marc Joseph Pickett
    Marcelo Amorim Menegali
    Marian Croak
    Maxim Krikun
    Noam Shazeer
    Rachel Bernstein
    Ravi Rajakumar
    Ray Kurzweil
    Romal Thoppilan
    Steven Zheng
    Taylor Bos
    Toju Duke
    Tulsee Doshi
    Vincent Y. Zhao
    Will Rusch
    Yuanzhong Xu
    arXiv(2022)
    Preview abstract We present LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. LaMDA is a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137B parameters and arepre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text. While model scaling alone canimprove quality, it shows less improvements on safety and factual grounding. We demonstrate thatfine-tuning with annotated data and enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources canlead to significant improvements towards the two key challenges of safety and factual grounding.The first challenge, safety, involves ensuring that the model’s responses are consistent with a set ofhuman values, such as preventing harmful suggestions and unfair bias. We quantify safety using ametric based on an illustrative set of values, and we find that filtering candidate responses using aLaMDA classifier fine-tuned with a small amount of crowdworker-annotated data offers a promisingapproach to improving model safety. The second challenge, factual grounding, involves enabling themodel to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a languagetranslator, and a calculator. We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that ourapproach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responsesthat merely sound plausible. Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education andcontent recommendations, and analyze their helpfulness and role consistency. View details
    Alpa: Automating Inter- and Intra-Operator Parallelism for Distributed Deep Learning
    Danyang Zhuo
    Hao Zhang
    Ion Stoica
    Joseph E. Gonzalez
    Lianmin Zheng
    Yida Wang
    Yonghao Zhuang
    Yuanzhong Xu
    Zhuohan Li
    16th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 22), USENIX Association(2022), pp. 559-578
    Preview abstract Alpa automates model-parallel training of large deep learning (DL) models by generating execution plans that unify data, operator, and pipeline parallelism. Existing model-parallel training systems either require users to manually create a parallelization plan or automatically generate one from a limited space of model parallelism configurations. They do not suffice to scale out complex DL models on distributed compute devices. Alpa distributes the training of large DL models by viewing parallelisms as two hierarchical levels: inter-operator and intra-operator parallelisms. Based on it, Alpa constructs a new hierarchical space for massive model-parallel execution plans. Alpa designs a number of compilation passes to automatically derive efficient parallel execution plans at each parallelism level. Alpa implements an efficient runtime to orchestrate the two-level parallel execution on distributed compute devices. Our evaluation shows Alpa generates parallelization plans that match or outperform hand-tuned model-parallel training systems even on models they are designed for. Unlike specialized systems, Alpa also generalizes to models with heterogeneous architectures and models without manually-designed plans. Alpa's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/alpa-projects/alpa View details
    Sparsely Activated Language Models are Efficient In-Context Learners
    Barret Richard Zoph
    Dmitry (Dima) Lepikhin
    Emma Wang
    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)
    Preview abstract 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. View details
    Preview abstract In this paper we share findings from our effort towards building practical machine translation (MT) systems capable of translating across over one thousand languages. We describe results across three research domains: (i) Building clean, web-mined datasets by leveraging semi-supervised pre-training for language-id and developing data-driven filtering techniques; (ii) Leveraging massively multilingual MT models trained with supervised parallel data for over $100$ languages and small monolingual datasets for over 1000 languages to enable translation for several previously under-studied languages; and (iii) Studying the limitations of evaluation metrics for long tail languages and conducting qualitative analysis of the outputs from our MT models. We hope that our work provides useful insights to practitioners working towards building MT systems for long tail languages, and highlights research directions that can complement the weaknesses of massively multilingual pre-trained models in data-sparse settings. View details
    GShard: Scaling Giant Models With Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding
    Dehao Chen
    Dmitry (Dima) Lepikhin
    HyoukJoong Lee
    Maxim Krikun
    Noam Shazeer
    Yuanzhong Xu
    ICLR 2021(2020) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Neural network scaling has been critical for improving the model quality in many real world machine learning applications with vast amounts of training data and compute. Although this trend of scaling is affirmed to be a sure-fire approach for better model quality, there are challenges on the path such as the computation cost, ease of programming, and efficient implementation on parallel devices. GShard is a module composed of a set of lightweight annotation APIs and an extension to the XLA compiler. It provides an elegant way to express a wide range of parallel computation patterns with minimal changes of existing model code. It enabled us to scale up multilingual machine translation Transformer model with Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts beyond 600 billion parameters using automatic sharding. We demonstrate that such a giant model can be easily trained on 2048 TPU v3 accelerators in 4 days to achieve far superior quality for translation from 100 languages to English compared to the prior art. View details
    A Streaming On-Device End-to-End Model Surpassing Server-Side Conventional Model Quality and Latency
    Ruoming Pang
    Antoine Bruguier
    Wei Li
    Raziel Alvarez
    Chung-Cheng Chiu
    David Garcia
    Kevin Hu
    Minho Jin
    Qiao Liang
    Cal Peyser
    David Rybach
    (June) Yuan Shangguan
    Yash Sheth
    Mirkó Visontai
    Yu Zhang
    Ding Zhao
    ICASSP(2020)
    Preview abstract Thus far, end-to-end (E2E) models have not shown to outperform state-of-the-art conventional models with respect to both quality, i.e., word error rate (WER), and latency, i.e., the time the hypothesis is finalized after the user stops speaking. In this paper, we develop a first-pass Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T) model and a second-pass Listen, Attend, Spell (LAS) rescorer that surpasses a conventional model in both quality and latency. On the quality side, we incorporate a large number of utterances across varied domains to increase acoustic diversity and the vocabulary seen by the model. We also train with accented English speech to make the model more robust to different pronunciations. In addition, given the increased amount of training data, we explore a varied learning rate schedule. On the latency front, we explore using the end-of-sentence decision emitted by the RNN-T model to close the microphone, and also introduce various optimizations to improve the speed of LAS rescoring. Overall, we find that RNN-T+LAS offers a better WER and latency tradeoff compared to a conventional model. For example, for the same latency, RNN-T+LAS obtains a 8% relative improvement in WER, while being more than 400-times smaller in model size. View details
    Preview abstract We introduce our efforts towards building a universal neural machine translation (NMT) system capable of translating between any language pair. We set a milestone towards this goal by building a single massively multilingual NMT model handling 103 languages trained over 25 billion examples. Our system demonstrates effective transfer learning ability, significantly improving translation quality of low-resource languages, while keeping high-resource language translation quality on-par with competitive bilingual baselines. We provide in-depth analysis of various aspects of model building that are crucial to the quality and practicality towards universal NMT. While we prototype a high-quality universal translation system, our extensive empirical analysis exposes issues that need to be further addressed, and we suggest directions for future research. View details
    Preview abstract Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models. View details