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Recent advances in implicit scene representation enable high-fidelity street view novel view synthesis. However, existing methods optimize a neural radiance field for each scene, relying heavily on dense training images and extensive computation resources. To mitigate this shortcoming, we introduce a new method called Efficient Depth-Guided Urban View Synthesis (EDUS) for fast feed-forward inference and efficient per-scene fine-tuning. Different from prior generalizable methods that infer geometry based on feature matching, EDUS leverages noisy predicted geometric priors as guidance to enable generalizable urban view synthesis from sparse input images. The geometric priors allow us to apply our generalizable model directly in the 3D space, gaining robustness across various sparsity levels. Through comprehensive experiments on the KITTI-360 and Waymo datasets, we demonstrate promising generalization abilities on novel street scenes. Moreover, our results indicate that EDUS achieves state-of-the-art performance in sparse view settings when combined with fast test-time optimization., Comment: ECCV2024, Project page: https://xdimlab.github.io/EDUS/

Foundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Models (LVMs), have emerged as one of the most powerful tools in the respective fields. However, unlike text and image data, graph data do not have a definitive structure, posing great challenges to developing a Graph Foundation Model (GFM). For example, current attempts at designing general graph models either transform graph data into a language format for LLM-based prediction or still train a GNN model with LLM as an assistant. The former can handle unlimited tasks, while the latter captures graph structure much better -- yet, no existing work can achieve both simultaneously. In this paper, we identify three key desirable properties of a GFM: self-supervised pretraining, fluidity in tasks, and graph awareness. To account for these properties, we extend the conventional language modeling to the graph domain and propose a novel generative graph language model GOFA to solve the problem. The model interleaves randomly initialized GNN layers into a frozen pre-trained LLM so that the semantic and structural modeling abilities are organically combined. GOFA is pre-trained on newly proposed graph-level next-word prediction, question-answering, and structural tasks to obtain the above GFM properties. The pre-trained model is further fine-tuned on downstream tasks to obtain task-solving ability. The fine-tuned model is evaluated on various downstream tasks, demonstrating a strong ability to solve structural and contextual problems in zero-shot scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/JiaruiFeng/GOFA.

With serial and parallel processors introduced into Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) execution, more and more researchers are dedicated to improving the performance of the computing paradigms by taking full advantage of the strengths of the available processor. In this paper, we compare and integrate serial and parallel paradigms into one SNN compiling system. For a faster switching between them in the layer granularity, we train the classifier to prejudge a better paradigm before compiling instead of making the decision afterward, saving a great amount of compiling time and RAM space on the host PC. The classifier Adaptive Boost, with the highest accuracy (91.69%) among 12 classifiers, is integrated into the switching system, which utilizes less memory and processors on the multi-core neuromorphic hardware backend SpiNNaker2 than two individual paradigms. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first fast-switching compiling system for SNN simulation.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling complex queries, much of the past work has depended on extensively annotated datasets by human experts. However, this reliance on fully-supervised annotations poses scalability challenges, particularly as models and data requirements grow. To mitigate this, we explore the potential of enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities with minimal human supervision. In this work, we introduce self-reinforcement, which begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of the model using a small collection of annotated questions. Then it iteratively improves LLMs by learning from the differences in responses from the SFT and unfinetuned models on unlabeled questions. Our approach provides an efficient approach without relying heavily on extensive human-annotated explanations. However, current reasoning benchmarks typically only include golden-reference answers or rationales. Therefore, we present \textsc{PuzzleBen}, a weakly supervised benchmark that comprises 25,147 complex questions, answers, and human-generated rationales across various domains, such as brainteasers, puzzles, riddles, parajumbles, and critical reasoning tasks. A unique aspect of our dataset is the inclusion of 10,000 unannotated questions, enabling us to explore utilizing fewer supersized data to boost LLMs' inference capabilities. Our experiments underscore the significance of \textsc{PuzzleBen}, as well as the effectiveness of our methodology as a promising direction in future endeavors. Our dataset and code will be published soon on \texttt{Anonymity Link}.

Dual-arm robots have great application prospects in intelligent manufacturing due to their human-like structure when deployed with advanced intelligence algorithm. However, the previous visuomotor policy suffers from perception deficiencies in environments where features of images are impaired by the various conditions, such as abnormal lighting, occlusion and shadow etc. The Focal CVAE framework is proposed for RGB-D multi-modal data fusion to address this challenge. In this study, a mixed focal attention module is designed for the fusion of RGB images containing color features and depth images containing 3D shape and structure information. This module highlights the prominent local features and focuses on the relevance of RGB and depth via cross-attention. A saliency attention module is proposed to improve its computational efficiency, which is applied in the encoder and the decoder of the framework. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method via extensive simulation and experiments. It's shown that the performances of bi-manipulation are all significantly improved in the four real-world tasks with lower computational cost. Besides, the robustness is validated through experiments under different scenarios where there is a perception deficiency problem, demonstrating the feasibility of the method., Comment: 14 pages,5 figures

This paper proposes an integrated approach combining computer networks and artificial neural networks to construct an intelligent network operator, functioning as an AI model. State information from computer networks is transformed into embedded vectors, enabling the operator to efficiently recognize different pieces of information and accurately output appropriate operations for the computer network at each step. The operator has undergone comprehensive testing, achieving a 100% accuracy rate, thus eliminating operational risks. Furthermore, a novel algorithm is proposed to emphasize crucial training losses, aiming to enhance the efficiency of operator training. Additionally, a simple computer network simulator is created and encapsulated into training and testing environment components, enabling automation of the data collection, training, and testing processes. This abstract outlines the core contributions of the paper while highlighting the innovative methodology employed in the development and validation of the AI-based network operator.

The medical field is one of the important fields in the application of artificial intelligence technology. With the explosive growth and diversification of medical data, as well as the continuous improvement of medical needs and challenges, artificial intelligence technology is playing an increasingly important role in the medical field. Artificial intelligence technologies represented by computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning have been widely penetrated into diverse scenarios such as medical imaging, health management, medical information, and drug research and development, and have become an important driving force for improving the level and quality of medical services.The article explores the transformative potential of generative AI in medical imaging, emphasizing its ability to generate syntheticACM-2 data, enhance images, aid in anomaly detection, and facilitate image-to-image translation. Despite challenges like model complexity, the applications of generative models in healthcare, including Med-PaLM 2 technology, show promising results. By addressing limitations in dataset size and diversity, these models contribute to more accurate diagnoses and improved patient outcomes. However, ethical considerations and collaboration among stakeholders are essential for responsible implementation. Through experiments leveraging GANs to augment brain tumor MRI datasets, the study demonstrates how generative AI can enhance image quality and diversity, ultimately advancing medical diagnostics and patient care.

The paragraph is grammatically correct and logically coherent. It discusses the importance of mobile terminal cloud computing migration technology in meeting the demands of evolving computer and cloud computing technologies. It emphasizes the need for efficient data access and storage, as well as the utilization of cloud computing migration technology to prevent additional time delays. The paragraph also highlights the contributions of cloud computing migration technology to expanding cloud computing services. Additionally, it acknowledges the role of virtualization as a fundamental capability of cloud computing while emphasizing that cloud computing and virtualization are not inherently interconnected. Finally, it introduces machine learning-based virtual machine migration optimization and dynamic resource allocation as a critical research direction in cloud computing, citing the limitations of static rules or manual settings in traditional cloud computing environments. Overall, the paragraph effectively communicates the importance of machine learning technology in addressing resource allocation and virtual machine migration challenges in cloud computing.

In recent years, cloud computing has been widely used. Cloud computing refers to the centralized computing resources, users through the access to the centralized resources to complete the calculation, the cloud computing center will return the results of the program processing to the user. Cloud computing is not only for individual users, but also for enterprise users. By purchasing a cloud server, users do not have to buy a large number of computers, saving computing costs. According to a report by China Economic News Network, the scale of cloud computing in China has reached 209.1 billion yuan. At present, the more mature cloud service providers in China are Ali Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Huawei Cloud and so on. Therefore, this paper proposes an innovative approach to solve complex problems in cloud computing resource scheduling and management using machine learning optimization techniques. Through in-depth study of challenges such as low resource utilization and unbalanced load in the cloud environment, this study proposes a comprehensive solution, including optimization methods such as deep learning and genetic algorithm, to improve system performance and efficiency, and thus bring new breakthroughs and progress in the field of cloud computing resource management.Rational allocation of resources plays a crucial role in cloud computing. In the resource allocation of cloud computing, the cloud computing center has limited cloud resources, and users arrive in sequence. Each user requests the cloud computing center to use a certain number of cloud resources at a specific time.

Although the multi-jointed underactuated manipulator is highly dexterous, its grasping capacity does not match that of the parallel jaw gripper. This work introduces a fractal gripper to enhance the grasping capacity of multi-joint underactuated manipulators, preserving their passive clamping features. We describe in detail the working principle and manufacturing process of the fractal gripper. This work, inspired by the 'Fractal Vise' structure, resulted in the invention of a fractal gripper with mode switching capabilities. The fractal gripper inherits the inherent adaptive properties of the fractal structure and realizes the self-resetting function by integrating spring into the original design, thereby enhancing the efficiency of object grasping tasks. The fractal gripper prevents object damage by distributing pressure evenly and applying it at multiple points through its fractal structure during closure. Objects of various shapes are effectively grasped by the fractal gripper, which ensures a safe and secure grasp. The superior performance was provided by the force distribution characteristics of the fractal gripper. By applying the flexible polymer PDMS, which possesses superior elasticity, to the fractal structure's wrapping surface, potential scratching during grasping is effectively prevented, thus protecting the object's geometric surface. Grab experiments with objects of diverse shapes and sizes confirm fractal gripper multi-scale adaptability and superior grasping stability.

At present, the incidence and fatality rate of lung cancer in China rank first among all malignant tumors. Despite the continuous development and improvement of China's medical level, the overall 5-year survival rate of lung cancer patients is still lower than 20% and is staged. A number of studies have confirmed that early diagnosis and treatment of early stage lung cancer is of great significance to improve the prognosis of patients. In recent years, artificial intelligence technology has gradually begun to be applied in oncology. ai is used in cancer screening, clinical diagnosis, radiation therapy (image acquisition, at-risk organ segmentation, image calibration and delivery) and other aspects of rapid development. However, whether medical ai can be socialized depends on the public's attitude and acceptance to a certain extent. However, at present, there are few studies on the diagnosis of early lung cancer by AI technology combined with SCT scanning. In view of this, this study applied the combined method in early lung cancer screening, aiming to find a safe and efficient screening mode and provide a reference for clinical diagnosis and treatment., Comment: This article was accepted by Frontiers in Computing and Intelligent Systems https://drpress.org/ojs/index.php/fcis/article/view/15781. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:nlin/0508031 by other authors

The joint progress of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and domain specific hardware accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs took over many domains of machine learning research. This development is accompanied by a rapid growth of the required computational demands for larger models and more data. Concurrently, emerging properties of foundation models such as in-context learning drive new opportunities for machine learning applications. However, the computational cost of such applications is a limiting factor of the technology in data centers, and more importantly in mobile devices and edge systems. To mediate the energy footprint and non-trivial latency of contemporary systems, neuromorphic computing systems deeply integrate computational principles of neurobiological systems by leveraging low-power analog and digital technologies. SpiNNaker2 is a digital neuromorphic chip developed for scalable machine learning. The event-based and asynchronous design of SpiNNaker2 allows the composition of large-scale systems involving thousands of chips. This work features the operating principles of SpiNNaker2 systems, outlining the prototype of novel machine learning applications. These applications range from ANNs over bio-inspired spiking neural networks to generalized event-based neural networks. With the successful development and deployment of SpiNNaker2, we aim to facilitate the advancement of event-based and asynchronous algorithms for future generations of machine learning systems., Comment: Submitted at the Workshop on Machine Learning with New Compute Paradigms at NeurIPS 2023 (MLNPCP 2023)

The objective of this study is to improve automated feedback tools designed for English Language Learners (ELLs) through the utilization of data science techniques encompassing machine learning, natural language processing, and educational data analytics. Automated essay scoring (AES) research has made strides in evaluating written essays, but it often overlooks the specific needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) in language development. This study explores the application of BERT-related techniques to enhance the assessment of ELLs' writing proficiency within AES. To address the specific needs of ELLs, we propose the use of DeBERTa, a state-of-the-art neural language model, for improving automated feedback tools. DeBERTa, pretrained on large text corpora using self-supervised learning, learns universal language representations adaptable to various natural language understanding tasks. The model incorporates several innovative techniques, including adversarial training through Adversarial Weights Perturbation (AWP) and Metric-specific AttentionPooling (6 kinds of AP) for each label in the competition. The primary focus of this research is to investigate the impact of hyperparameters, particularly the adversarial learning rate, on the performance of the model. By fine-tuning the hyperparameter tuning process, including the influence of 6AP and AWP, the resulting models can provide more accurate evaluations of language proficiency and support tailored learning tasks for ELLs. This work has the potential to significantly benefit ELLs by improving their English language proficiency and facilitating their educational journey., Comment: This article was accepted by 2023 International Conference on Information Network and Computer Communications(INCC)

The process of transforming input images into corresponding textual explanations stands as a crucial and complex endeavor within the domains of computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we propose an innovative ensemble approach that harnesses the capabilities of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining models.

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) is the task of identifying specific entity types at a fine-grained level for entity mentions based on their contextual information. Conventional methods for FET require extensive human annotation, which is time-consuming and costly. Recent studies have been developing weakly supervised or zero-shot approaches. We study the setting of zero-shot FET where only an ontology is provided. However, most existing ontology structures lack rich supporting information and even contain ambiguous relations, making them ineffective in guiding FET. Recently developed language models, though promising in various few-shot and zero-shot NLP tasks, may face challenges in zero-shot FET due to their lack of interaction with task-specific ontology. In this study, we propose OnEFET, where we (1) enrich each node in the ontology structure with two types of extra information: instance information for training sample augmentation and topic information to relate types to contexts, and (2) develop a coarse-to-fine typing algorithm that exploits the enriched information by training an entailment model with contrasting topics and instance-based augmented training samples. Our experiments show that OnEFET achieves high-quality fine-grained entity typing without human annotation, outperforming existing zero-shot methods by a large margin and rivaling supervised methods.

Unsupervised learning of 3D-aware generative adversarial networks has lately made much progress. Some recent work demonstrates promising results of learning human generative models using neural articulated radiance fields, yet their generalization ability and controllability lag behind parametric human models, i.e., they do not perform well when generalizing to novel pose/shape and are not part controllable. To solve these problems, we propose VeRi3D, a generative human vertex-based radiance field parameterized by vertices of the parametric human template, SMPL. We map each 3D point to the local coordinate system defined on its neighboring vertices, and use the corresponding vertex feature and local coordinates for mapping it to color and density values. We demonstrate that our simple approach allows for generating photorealistic human images with free control over camera pose, human pose, shape, as well as enabling part-level editing.

In this work, we present a generic approach to transform CSS codes by building upon their equivalence to phase-free ZX diagrams. Using the ZX calculus, we demonstrate diagrammatic transformations between encoding maps associated with different codes. As a motivating example, we give explicit transformations between the Steane code and the quantum Reed-Muller code, since by switching between these two codes, one can obtain a fault-tolerant universal gate set. To this end, we propose a bidirectional rewrite rule to find a (not necessarily transversal) physical implementation for any logical ZX diagram in any CSS code. Then we focus on two code transformation techniques: code morphing, a procedure that transforms a code while retaining its fault-tolerant gates, and gauge fixing, where complimentary codes can be obtained from a common subsystem code (e.g., the Steane and the quantum Reed-Muller codes from the [[15,1,3,3]] code). We provide explicit graphical derivations for these techniques and show how ZX and graphical encoder maps relate several equivalent perspectives on these code-transforming operations., Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2023, arXiv:2308.15489

Recent studies have revealed the intriguing few-shot learning ability of pretrained language models (PLMs): They can quickly adapt to a new task when fine-tuned on a small amount of labeled data formulated as prompts, without requiring abundant task-specific annotations. Despite their promising performance, most existing few-shot approaches that only learn from the small training set still underperform fully supervised training by nontrivial margins. In this work, we study few-shot learning with PLMs from a different perspective: We first tune an autoregressive PLM on the few-shot samples and then use it as a generator to synthesize a large amount of novel training samples which augment the original training set. To encourage the generator to produce label-discriminative samples, we train it via weighted maximum likelihood where the weight of each token is automatically adjusted based on a discriminative meta-learning objective. A classification PLM can then be fine-tuned on both the few-shot and the synthetic samples with regularization for better generalization and stability. Our approach FewGen achieves an overall better result across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark than existing few-shot learning methods, improving no-augmentation methods by 5+ average points, and outperforming augmentation methods by 3+ average points., Comment: ICML 2023. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/FewGen)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without external inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that an LLM is also capable of self-improving with only unlabeled datasets. We use a pre-trained LLM to generate "high-confidence" rationale-augmented answers for unlabeled questions using Chain-of-Thought prompting and self-consistency, and fine-tune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that our approach improves the general reasoning ability of a 540B-parameter LLM (74.4%->82.1% on GSM8K, 78.2%->83.0% on DROP, 90.0%->94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4%->67.9% on ANLI-A3) and achieves state-of-the-art-level performance, without any ground truth label. We conduct ablation studies and show that fine-tuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement.

We study the problem of few-shot Fine-grained Entity Typing (FET), where only a few annotated entity mentions with contexts are given for each entity type. Recently, prompt-based tuning has demonstrated superior performance to standard fine-tuning in few-shot scenarios by formulating the entity type classification task as a ''fill-in-the-blank'' problem. This allows effective utilization of the strong language modeling capability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Despite the success of current prompt-based tuning approaches, two major challenges remain: (1) the verbalizer in prompts is either manually designed or constructed from external knowledge bases, without considering the target corpus and label hierarchy information, and (2) current approaches mainly utilize the representation power of PLMs, but have not explored their generation power acquired through extensive general-domain pre-training. In this work, we propose a novel framework for few-shot FET consisting of two modules: (1) an entity type label interpretation module automatically learns to relate type labels to the vocabulary by jointly leveraging few-shot instances and the label hierarchy, and (2) a type-based contextualized instance generator produces new instances based on given instances to enlarge the training set for better generalization. On three benchmark datasets, our model outperforms existing methods by significant margins. Code can be found at https://github.com/teapot123/Fine-Grained-Entity-Typing., Comment: Accepted to KDD 2022 Research Track

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are expected to establish valuable applications on near-term quantum computers. However, recent works have pointed out that the performance of VQAs greatly relies on the expressibility of the ansatzes and is seriously limited by optimization issues such as barren plateaus (i.e., vanishing gradients). This work proposes the state efficient ansatz (SEA) for accurate ground state preparation with improved trainability. We show that the SEA can generate an arbitrary pure state with much fewer parameters than a universal ansatz, making it efficient for tasks like ground state estimation. Then, we prove that barren plateaus can be efficiently mitigated by the SEA and the trainability can be further improved most quadratically by flexibly adjusting the entangling capability of the SEA. Finally, we investigate a plethora of examples in ground state estimation where we obtain significant improvements in the magnitude of cost gradient and the convergence speed., Comment: 20 pages including appendix

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) models have shown their robustness, effectiveness, and efficiency for transferring learned knowledge across tasks. In real industrial applications such as web content classification, multiple classification tasks are predicted from the same input text such as a web article. However, at the serving time, the existing multitask transformer models such as prompt or adaptor based approaches need to conduct N forward passes for N tasks with O(N) computation cost. To tackle this problem, we propose a scalable method that can achieve stronger performance with close to O(1) computation cost via only one forward pass. To illustrate real application usage, we release a multitask dataset on news topic and style classification. Our experiments show that our proposed method outperforms strong baselines on both the GLUE benchmark and our news dataset. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://bit.ly/mtop-code.

Topic models have been the prominent tools for automatic topic discovery from text corpora. Despite their effectiveness, topic models suffer from several limitations including the inability of modeling word ordering information in documents, the difficulty of incorporating external linguistic knowledge, and the lack of both accurate and efficient inference methods for approximating the intractable posterior. Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have brought astonishing performance improvements to a wide variety of tasks due to their superior representations of text. Interestingly, there have not been standard approaches to deploy PLMs for topic discovery as better alternatives to topic models. In this paper, we begin by analyzing the challenges of using PLM representations for topic discovery, and then propose a joint latent space learning and clustering framework built upon PLM embeddings. In the latent space, topic-word and document-topic distributions are jointly modeled so that the discovered topics can be interpreted by coherent and distinctive terms and meanwhile serve as meaningful summaries of the documents. Our model effectively leverages the strong representation power and superb linguistic features brought by PLMs for topic discovery, and is conceptually simpler than topic models. On two benchmark datasets in different domains, our model generates significantly more coherent and diverse topics than strong topic models, and offers better topic-wise document representations, based on both automatic and human evaluations., Comment: WWW 2022. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/TopClus)

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks: Unidirectional PLMs (e.g., GPT) are well known for their superior text generation capabilities; bidirectional PLMs (e.g., BERT) have been the prominent choice for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While both types of models have achieved promising few-shot learning performance, their potential for zero-shot learning has been underexplored. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses both types of PLMs for fully zero-shot learning of NLU tasks without requiring any task-specific data: A unidirectional PLM generates class-conditioned texts guided by prompts, which are used as the training data for fine-tuning a bidirectional PLM. With quality training data selected based on the generation probability and regularization techniques (label smoothing and temporal ensembling) applied to the fine-tuning stage for better generalization and stability, our approach demonstrates strong performance across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark (e.g., 72.3/73.8 on MNLI-m/mm and 92.8 on SST-2), significantly outperforming zero-shot prompting methods and achieving even comparable results to strong few-shot approaches using 32 training samples per class., Comment: NeurIPS 2022. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/SuperGen)

Opinion summarization aims to profile a target by extracting opinions from multiple documents. Most existing work approaches the task in a semi-supervised manner due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality annotation from thousands of documents. Among them, some use aspect and sentiment analysis as a proxy for identifying opinions. In this work, we propose a new framework, FineSum, which advances this frontier in three aspects: (1) minimal supervision, where only aspect names and a few aspect/sentiment keywords are available; (2) fine-grained opinion analysis, where sentiment analysis drills down to the sub-aspect level; and (3) phrase-based summarization, where opinion is summarized in the form of phrases. FineSum automatically identifies opinion phrases from the raw corpus, classifies them into different aspects and sentiments, and constructs multiple fine-grained opinion clusters under each aspect/sentiment. Each cluster consists of semantically coherent phrases, expressing uniform opinions towards certain sub-aspect or characteristics (e.g., positive feelings for ``burgers'' in the ``food'' aspect). An opinion-oriented spherical word embedding space is trained to provide weak supervision for the phrase classifier, and phrase clustering is performed using the aspect-aware contextualized embedding generated from the phrase classifier. Both automatic evaluation on the benchmark and quantitative human evaluation validate the effectiveness of our approach.

We study the problem of training named entity recognition (NER) models using only distantly-labeled data, which can be automatically obtained by matching entity mentions in the raw text with entity types in a knowledge base. The biggest challenge of distantly-supervised NER is that the distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, rendering the straightforward application of supervised learning ineffective. In this paper, we propose (1) a noise-robust learning scheme comprised of a new loss function and a noisy label removal step, for training NER models on distantly-labeled data, and (2) a self-training method that uses contextualized augmentations created by pre-trained language models to improve the generalization ability of the NER model. On three benchmark datasets, our method achieves superior performance, outperforming existing distantly-supervised NER models by significant margins., Comment: EMNLP 2021. (Code: https://github.com/yumeng5/RoSTER)

This paper presents a comprehensive study to efficiently build named entity recognition (NER) systems when a small number of in-domain labeled data is available. Based upon recent Transformer-based self-supervised pre-trained language models (PLMs), we investigate three orthogonal schemes to improve the model generalization ability for few-shot settings: (1) meta-learning to construct prototypes for different entity types, (2) supervised pre-training on noisy web data to extract entity-related generic representations and (3) self-training to leverage unlabeled in-domain data. Different combinations of these schemes are also considered. We perform extensive empirical comparisons on 10 public NER datasets with various proportions of labeled data, suggesting useful insights for future research. Our experiments show that (i) in the few-shot learning setting, the proposed NER schemes significantly improve or outperform the commonly used baseline, a PLM-based linear classifier fine-tuned on domain labels; (ii) We create new state-of-the-art results on both few-shot and training-free settings compared with existing methods. We will release our code and pre-trained models for reproducible research.