Pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieve remarkable performance on many downstream tasks, but may fail in giving reliable estimates of their predictive uncertainty. Given the lack of a comprehensive understanding of PLMs calibration, we take a close look into this new research problem, aiming to answer two questions: (1) Do PLMs learn to become calibrated in the training process? (2) How effective are existing calibration methods? For the first question, we conduct fine-grained control experiments to study the dynamic change in PLMs' calibration performance in training. We consider six factors as control variables, including dataset difficulty, available training samples, training steps, the number of tunable parameters, model scale, and pretraining. In experiments, we observe a consistent change in calibration performance across six factors. We find that PLMs don't learn to become calibrated in training, evidenced by the continual increase in confidence, no matter the predictions are correct or not. We highlight that our finding presents some contradiction with two established conclusions: (a) Larger PLMs are more calibrated; (b) Pretraining improves model calibration. Next, we study the effectiveness of existing calibration methods in mitigating the overconfidence issue, in both in-distribution and various out-of-distribution settings. Besides unlearnable calibration methods, we adapt two recently proposed learnable methods that directly collect data to train models to have reasonable confidence estimations. Also, we propose extended learnable methods based on existing ones to further improve or maintain PLMs calibration without sacrificing the original task performance. Experimental results show that learnable methods significantly reduce PLMs' confidence in wrong predictions, and our methods exhibit superior performance compared with previous methods.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to improve the generalization performance of natural language understanding models by leveraging large amounts of data during the pre-training phase. However, the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks, limiting the real-world deployment of these methods. This paper presents the first attempt at creating a unified benchmark named GLUE-X for evaluating OOD robustness in NLP models, highlighting the importance of OOD robustness and providing insights on how to measure the robustness of a model and how to improve it. The benchmark includes 13 publicly available datasets for OOD testing, and evaluations are conducted on 8 classic NLP tasks over 19 popularly used PLMs. Our findings confirm the need for improved OOD accuracy in NLP tasks, as significant performance degradation was observed in all settings compared to in-distribution (ID) accuracy.

With the evergrowing sizes of pre-trained models (PTMs), it has been an emerging practice to only provide the inference APIs for users, namely model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting. To adapt PTMs with model parameters frozen, most current approaches focus on the input side, seeking for powerful prompts to stimulate models for correct answers. However, we argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals and they usually require thousands of API queries, resulting in high computation and time costs. In light of this, we present Decoder Tuning (DecT), which in contrast optimizes task-specific decoder networks on the output side. Specifically, DecT first extracts prompt-stimulated output scores for initial predictions. On top of that, we train an additional decoder network on the output representations to incorporate posterior data knowledge. By gradient-based optimization, DecT can be trained within several seconds and requires only one PTM query per sample. Empirically, we conduct extensive natural language understanding experiments and show that DecT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a $10^3\times$ speed-up.

How can we extend a pre-trained model to many language understanding tasks, without labeled or additional unlabeled data? Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been effective for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, existing approaches either require fine-tuning on downstream labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. In this paper, we propose nonparametric prompting PLM (NPPrompt) for fully zero-shot language understanding. Unlike previous methods, NPPrompt uses only pre-trained language models and does not require any labeled data or additional raw corpus for further fine-tuning, nor does it rely on humans to construct a comprehensive set of prompt label words. We evaluate NPPrompt against previous major few-shot and zero-shot learning methods on diverse NLP tasks: including text classification, text entailment, similar text retrieval, and paraphrasing. Experimental results demonstrate that our NPPrompt outperforms the previous best fully zero-shot method by big margins, with absolute gains of 12.8% in accuracy on text classification and 18.9% on the GLUE benchmark.

尽管对检测分配（OOD）示例的重要性一致，但就OOD示例的正式定义几乎没有共识，以及如何最好地检测到它们。我们将这些示例分类为它们是否表现出背景换档或语义移位，并发现ood检测，模型校准和密度估计（文本语言建模）的两个主要方法，对这些类型的ood数据具有不同的行为。在14对分布和ood英语自然语言理解数据集中，我们发现密度估计方法一致地在背景移位设置中展开校准方法，同时在语义移位设置中执行更糟。此外，我们发现两种方法通常都无法检测到挑战数据中的示例，突出显示当前方法的弱点。由于没有单个方法在所有设置上都效果很好，因此在评估不同的检测方法时，我们的结果呼叫了OOD示例的明确定义。

The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF-better few-shot fine-tuning of language models 1 -a suite of simple and complementary techniques for finetuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning. 2 * The first two authors contributed equally. 1 Alternatively, language models' best friends forever. 2 Our implementation is publicly available at https:// github.com/princeton-nlp/LM-BFF.

Calibration strengthens the trustworthiness of black-box models by producing better accurate confidence estimates on given examples. However, little is known about if model explanations can help confidence calibration. Intuitively, humans look at important features attributions and decide whether the model is trustworthy. Similarly, the explanations can tell us when the model may or may not know. Inspired by this, we propose a method named CME that leverages model explanations to make the model less confident with non-inductive attributions. The idea is that when the model is not highly confident, it is difficult to identify strong indications of any class, and the tokens accordingly do not have high attribution scores for any class and vice versa. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets with two popular pre-trained language models in the in-domain and out-of-domain settings. The results show that CME improves calibration performance in all settings. The expected calibration errors are further reduced when combined with temperature scaling. Our findings highlight that model explanations can help calibrate posterior estimates.

人工智能的最新趋势是将验证的模型用于语言和视觉任务，这些模型已经实现了非凡的表现，但也令人困惑。因此，以各种方式探索这些模型的能力对该领域至关重要。在本文中，我们探讨了模型的可靠性，在其中我们将可靠的模型定义为一个不仅可以实现强大的预测性能，而且在许多涉及不确定性（例如选择性预测，开放式设置识别）的决策任务上，在许多决策任务上表现出色，而且表现良好。强大的概括（例如，准确性和适当的评分规则，例如在分布数据集中和分发数据集上的对数可能性）和适应性（例如，主动学习，几乎没有射击不确定性）。我们设计了40个数据集的10种任务类型，以评估视觉和语言域上可靠性的不同方面。为了提高可靠性，我们分别开发了VIT-PLEX和T5-PLEX，分别针对视觉和语言方式扩展了大型模型。 PLEX极大地改善了跨可靠性任务的最先进，并简化了传统协议，因为它可以改善开箱即用的性能，并且不需要设计分数或为每个任务调整模型。我们演示了高达1B参数的模型尺寸的缩放效果，并预处理数据集大小最多4B示例。我们还展示了PLEX在具有挑战性的任务上的功能，包括零射门的开放式识别，主动学习和对话语言理解中的不确定性。

我们提出了Patron，这是一种新方法，它使用基于及时的不确定性估计，用于在冷启动场景下进行预训练的语言模型进行微调的数据选择，即，没有初始标记的数据可用。在顾客中，我们设计（1）一种基于迅速的不确定性传播方法来估计数据点的重要性和（2）分区 - 然后 - 剥离（PTR）策略，以促进对注释的样品多样性。六个文本分类数据集的实验表明，赞助人的表现优于最强的冷启动数据选择基准，高达6.9％。此外，仅具有128个标签，顾客分别基于香草微调和及时的学习，获得了91.0％和92.1％的全面监督性能。我们的赞助人实施可在\ url {https://github.com/yueyu1030/patron}上获得。

提示将下游应用程序作为语言建模任务施放，与使用预训练的模型进行标准微调相比，已显示出样本有效的效率。但是，提示的一个陷阱是需要手动设计的模式，其结果可能是不直觉的，需要大量的验证集来调整。为了应对挑战，我们提出了一种全自动提示方法Autoseq：（1）我们在序列到序列模型上采用自然语言提示，从而实现自由形式生成和更大的标签搜索空间； （2）我们提出了标签序列 - 无限长度的短语以口头表达标签 - 这消除了手动模板的需求，并且比单个标签单词更具有表现力； （3）我们使用Beam Search自动生成大量的标签序列候选物，并提出对比度重新排列以获得最佳组合。 Autoseq显着胜过其他无手动设计方法，例如软提示调整，适配器调整和自动搜索单个标签单词；生成的标签序列比各种任务上的精选手动序列更好。我们的方法揭示了几次学习中序列模型的潜力，并阐明了通用通用和自动提示的途径。本文的源代码可以从https://github.com/thunlp/seq2seq-prompt获得。

基于方面的情感分析（ABSA）是一项精细的情感分析任务，它的重点是检测句子中的情感极性。但是，它始终对多方面的挑战敏感，在句子中，多个方面的特征将相互影响。为了减轻此问题，我们设计了一个新颖的培训框架，称为对比度跨通道数据增强（C3 DA），该框架利用了一个内域的发电机来构建更多的多种相应样本，然后通过对比度模型通过对比度学习的稳健性，从而通过对比度学习的稳健性这些生成的数据。实际上，鉴于生成预审预测的语言模型和一些有限的ABSA标记数据，我们首先采用一些参数效率的方法来执行内域微调。然后，所获得的内域发生器用于从两个通道（即方面增强通道和极性增强通道）生成合成句子，该句子分别在给定的方面和极性上生成句子条件。具体而言，我们的C3 DA以跨渠道的方式执行句子生成以获取更多句子，并提出了熵最小化过滤器以滤除低质量生成的样品。广泛的实验表明，我们的C3 DA可以在准确性和宏观上胜过约1％的基准，而不会增加1％。代码和数据在https://github.com/wangbing1416/c3da中发布。

We demonstrate that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even becoming competitive with prior state-ofthe-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous nonsparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks. We also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora.

Calibration is a popular framework to evaluate whether a classifier knows when it does not know - i.e., its predictive probabilities are a good indication of how likely a prediction is to be correct. Correctness is commonly estimated against the human majority class. Recently, calibration to human majority has been measured on tasks where humans inherently disagree about which class applies. We show that measuring calibration to human majority given inherent disagreements is theoretically problematic, demonstrate this empirically on the ChaosNLI dataset, and derive several instance-level measures of calibration that capture key statistical properties of human judgements - class frequency, ranking and entropy.

最近已被证明大型语言模型在各种任务集中获得合理的零射普通化（Brown等，2020）。它已经假设这是语言模型的隐式多任务学习的结果，在语言模型中的预押（Radford等，2019）。可以通过明确的多任务学习直接引起零拍常规化？为了以缩放测试这个问题，我们开发一个系统，以便轻松地将任何自然语言任务映射到人类可读的提示表单中。我们转换一组大量的监督数据集，每个数据集都有多个提示，具有不同的措辞。这些提示的数据集允许基准测试模型执行完全看不见的任务的能力。我们介绍了一个普拉克尔编码器 - 解码器模型（Raffel等，2020; Lester等，2021），覆盖各种任务。该模型在多个标准数据集中达到强大的零点性能，通常优于其尺寸的型号超过16倍。此外，我们的方法对来自Big-替补基准测试的任务子集具有强烈性能，优于其尺寸的6倍。所有提示和培训的型号都可以在https://github.com/ bigscience-workshop / protectsource / httpsource / https：//huggingface.co/bigscience/t0pp。

快速学习已成为现代自然语言处理的新范式，它直接适应培训的语言模型（PLMS）到$ CLOZE $ -Style预测，自回归建模或序列到序列生成，从而导致各种任务的表现。但是，尚未提出及时学习的标准实施框架，以及大多数现有的及时学习码条，通常是不受管制的，仅为特定方案提供有限的实现。由于有许多细节，例如模板策略，初始化策略和语言化策略等，因此需要在快速学习中考虑，从业者面临障碍，以便快速调整所需的迅速学习方法到他们的应用程序。在本文中，我们展示了{OpenPrompt}，一个统一的易于使用的工具包，可以通过PLMS快速学习。 OpenPrompt是一项研究型框架，配备了效率，模块化和可扩展性，其组合性允许自由地将不同的PLMS，任务格式和提示模块组合在统一的范例中。用户可以宽松地部署快速学习框架，并在没有约束的情况下在不同的NLP任务上评估它们的泛化。 OpenPrompt在{\ url {https://github.com/thunlp/openprompt}}上公开发布。

Existing techniques for training language models can be misaligned with the truth: if we train models with imitation learning, they may reproduce errors that humans make; if we train them to generate text that humans rate highly, they may output errors that human evaluators can't detect. We propose circumventing this issue by directly finding latent knowledge inside the internal activations of a language model in a purely unsupervised way. Specifically, we introduce a method for accurately answering yes-no questions given only unlabeled model activations. It works by finding a direction in activation space that satisfies logical consistency properties, such as that a statement and its negation have opposite truth values. We show that despite using no supervision and no model outputs, our method can recover diverse knowledge represented in large language models: across 6 models and 10 question-answering datasets, it outperforms zero-shot accuracy by 4\% on average. We also find that it cuts prompt sensitivity in half and continues to maintain high accuracy even when models are prompted to generate incorrect answers. Our results provide an initial step toward discovering what language models know, distinct from what they say, even when we don't have access to explicit ground truth labels.

In many task settings, text classification models are likely to encounter examples from novel classes on which they cannot predict correctly. Selective prediction, in which models abstain on low-confidence examples, provides a possible solution, but existing models are often overly confident on OOD examples. To remedy this overconfidence, we introduce Contrastive Novelty-Augmented Learning (CoNAL), a two-step method that generates OOD examples representative of novel classes, then trains to decrease confidence on them. First, we generate OOD examples by prompting a large language model twice: we prompt it to enumerate relevant novel labels, then generate examples from each novel class matching the task format. Second, we train our classifier with a novel contrastive objective that encourages lower confidence on generated OOD examples than training examples. When trained with CoNAL, classifiers improve in their ability to detect and abstain on OOD examples over prior methods by an average of 2.3% AUAC and 5.5% AUROC across 4 NLP datasets, with no cost to in-distribution accuracy.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

大型预训练的语言模型（PLM）的最新进展导致了自然语言理解（NLU）任务的令人印象深刻的增长，并具有特定于任务的微调。但是，直接调整PLM在很大程度上依赖大量的标记实例，这些实例通常很难获得。迅速对PLM的调整已被证明对各种少数次任务很有价值。现有的作品研究基于迅速的NLU任务的基于及时的调整，主要集中于用语言器来得出正确的标签单词或生成及时的模板，以从PLM中启发语义。此外，还对常规数据增强方法进行了验证，可用于少量射击任务。但是，目前几乎没有针对基于及时的调整范式设计的数据增强方法。因此，我们研究了迅速的少数射击学习者的新数据增强问题。由于标签语义对于迅速的调整至关重要，因此我们提出了一种新颖的标签引导数据增强方法促进DA，该方法利用了丰富的标签语义信息以进行数据增强。很少的文本分类任务的广泛实验结果表明，我们提出的框架通过有效利用标签语义和数据扩展来实现自然语言理解来实现卓越的性能。

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) is emerging area in the field of natural language generation (NLG). It is regarded as crucial for the development of advanced text generation technologies that are more natural and better meet the specific constraints in practical applications. In recent years, methods using large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), in particular the widely used transformer-based PLMs, have become a new paradigm of NLG, allowing generation of more diverse and fluent text. However, due to the lower level of interpretability of deep neural networks, the controllability of these methods need to be guaranteed. To this end, controllable text generation using transformer-based PLMs has become a rapidly growing yet challenging new research hotspot. A diverse range of approaches have emerged in the recent 3-4 years, targeting different CTG tasks which may require different types of controlled constraints. In this paper, we present a systematic critical review on the common tasks, main approaches and evaluation methods in this area. Finally, we discuss the challenges that the field is facing, and put forward various promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper to summarize CTG techniques from the perspective of PLMs. We hope it can help researchers in related fields to quickly track the academic frontier, providing them with a landscape of the area and a roadmap for future research.