Next paper candidates: 22 Feb

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Next paper candidates

Let's propose papers to study next! All papers mentioned in the comments of this issue will be listed in the next vote.

Last session runner-up(s)

"The Adverse Effects of Code Duplication in Machine Learning Models of Code", 2018

The field of big code relies on mining large corpora of code to perform some learning task. A significant threat to this approach has been recently identified by Lopes et al. (2017) who found a large amount of code duplication on GitHub. However, the impact of code duplication has not been noticed by researchers devising machine learning models for source code. In this article, we study the effect of code duplication to machine learning models showing that reported metrics are sometimes inflated by up to 100% when testing on duplicated code corpora compared to the performance on de-duplicated corpora which more accurately represent how machine learning models of code are used by software engineers. We present an "errata" for widely used datasets, list best practices for collecting code corpora and evaluating machine learning models on them, and release tools to help the community avoid this problem in future research.

A paper on: if more text usually improves quality of model in NLP, why does not more code help in case of ML on Code research?

[Jan21]

Learning and Evaluating General Linguistic Intelligence

We define general linguistic intelligence as the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge about a language's lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic conventions to adapt to new tasks quickly. Using this definition, we analyze state-of-the-art natural language understanding models and conduct an extensive empirical investigation to evaluate them against these criteria through a series of experiments that assess the task-independence of the knowledge being acquired by the learning process. In addition to task performance, we propose a new evaluation metric based on an online encoding of the test data that quantifies how quickly an existing agent (model) learns a new task. Our results show that while the field has made impressive progress in terms of model architectures that generalize to many tasks, these models still require a lot of in-domain training examples (e.g., for fine tuning, training task-specific modules), and are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, we find that far from solving general tasks (e.g., document question answering), our models are overfitting to the quirks of particular datasets (e.g., SQuAD). We discuss missing components and conjecture on how to make progress toward general linguistic intelligence.

[Jan21]

Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

The structure and performance of neural networks are intimately connected, and by use of evolutionary algorithms, neural network structures optimally adapted to a given task can be explored. Guiding such neuroevolution with additional objectives related to network structure has been shown to improve performance in some cases, especially when modular neural networks are beneficial. However, apart from objectives aiming to make networks more modular, such structural objectives have not been widely explored. We propose two new structural objectives and test their ability to guide evolving neural networks on two problems which can benefit from decomposition into subtasks. The first structural objective guides evolution to align neural networks with a user-recommended decomposition pattern. Intuitively, this should be a powerful guiding target for problems where human users can easily identify a structure. The second structural objective guides evolution towards a population with a high diversity in decomposition patterns. This results in exploration of many different ways to decompose a problem, allowing evolution to find good decompositions faster. Tests on our target problems reveal that both methods perform well on a problem with a very clear and decomposable structure. However, on a problem where the optimal decomposition is less obvious, the structural diversity objective is found to outcompete other structural objectives -- and this technique can even increase performance on problems without any decomposable structure at all.

The new openAI LM paper with quite impressive results.

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The poll is on https://sourced-community.slack.com/archives/CCLPL1WQH/p1550496655001600

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The paper was chosen