Gabriele Prato


2023

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EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models
Gabriele Prato | Jerry Huang | Prasanna Parthasarathi | Shagun Sodhani | Sarath Chandar
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In the age of artificial intelligence, the role of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly central. Despite their growing prevalence, their capacity to consolidate knowledge from different training documents—a crucial ability in numerous applications—remains unexplored. This paper presents the first study examining the capability of LLMs to effectively combine such information within their parameter space. We introduce EpiK-Eval, a novel question-answering benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs’ proficiency in formulating a coherent and consistent knowledge representation from segmented narratives. Evaluations across various LLMs reveal significant weaknesses in this domain. We contend that these shortcomings stem from the intrinsic nature of prevailing training objectives. Consequently, we advocate for refining the approach towards knowledge consolidation, as it harbors the potential to dramatically improve their overall effectiveness and performance. The findings from this study offer insights for developing more robust and reliable LLMs. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EpiK-Eval

2020

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Fully Quantized Transformer for Machine Translation
Gabriele Prato | Ella Charlaix | Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

State-of-the-art neural machine translation methods employ massive amounts of parameters. Drastically reducing computational costs of such methods without affecting performance has been up to this point unsuccessful. To this end, we propose FullyQT: an all-inclusive quantization strategy for the Transformer. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show that it is possible to avoid any loss in translation quality with a fully quantized Transformer. Indeed, compared to full-precision, our 8-bit models score greater or equal BLEU on most tasks. Comparing ourselves to all previously proposed methods, we achieve state-of-the-art quantization results.

2019

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Towards Lossless Encoding of Sentences
Gabriele Prato | Mathieu Duchesneau | Sarath Chandar | Alain Tapp
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

A lot of work has been done in the field of image compression via machine learning, but not much attention has been given to the compression of natural language. Compressing text into lossless representations while making features easily retrievable is not a trivial task, yet has huge benefits. Most methods designed to produce feature rich sentence embeddings focus solely on performing well on downstream tasks and are unable to properly reconstruct the original sequence from the learned embedding. In this work, we propose a near lossless method for encoding long sequences of texts as well as all of their sub-sequences into feature rich representations. We test our method on sentiment analysis and show good performance across all sub-sentence and sentence embeddings.