Hang Cao


2024

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RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners
Chi Hu | Yuan Ge | Xiangnan Ma | Hang Cao | Qiang Li | Yonghua Yang | Tong Xiao | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various reasoning tasks. However, even state-of-the-art LLMs such as ChatGPT are prone to logical errors during their reasoning processes. Existing solutions, such as deploying task-specific verifiers or voting over multiple reasoning paths, either require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. To address these challenges, we introduce RankPrompt, a new prompting method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. RankPrompt breaks down the ranking problem into a series of comparisons among diverse responses, leveraging the inherent capabilities of LLMs to generate chains of comparison as contextual exemplars. Our experiments across 11 arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks show that RankPrompt significantly enhances the reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4, with improvements of up to 13%. Moreover, RankPrompt excels in LLM-based automatic evaluations for open-ended tasks, aligning with human judgments 74% of the time in the AlpacaEval dataset. It also exhibits robustness to variations in response order and consistency. Collectively, our results validate RankPrompt as an effective method for eliciting high-quality feedback from language models.

2023

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Improving Autoregressive Grammatical Error Correction with Non-autoregressive Models
Hang Cao | Zhiquan Cao | Chi Hu | Baoyu Hou | Tong Xiao | Jingbo Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to correct grammatical errors in sentences. We find that autoregressive models tend to assign low probabilities to tokens that need corrections. Here we introduce additional signals to the training of GEC models so that these systems can learn to better predict at ambiguous positions. To do this, we use a non-autoregressive model as an auxiliary model, and develop a new regularization term of training by considering the difference in predictions between the autoregressive and non-autoregressive models. We experiment with this method on both English and Chinese GEC tasks. Experimental results show that our GEC system outperforms the baselines on all the data sets significantly.

2022

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The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT22
Weiqiao Shan | Zhiquan Cao | Yuchen Han | Siming Wu | Yimin Hu | Jie Wang | Yi Zhang | Hou Baoyu | Hang Cao | Chenghao Gao | Xiaowen Liu | Tong Xiao | Anxiang Ma | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper describes the NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT22 General MT constrained task. We participate in four directions, including Chinese→English, English→Croatian, and Livonian↔English. Our models are based on several advanced Transformer variants, e.g., Transformer-ODE, Universal Multiscale Transformer (UMST). The main workflow consists of data filtering, large-scale data augmentation (i.e., iterative back-translation, iterative knowledge distillation), and specific-domain fine-tuning. Moreover, we try several multi-domain methods, such as a multi-domain model structure and a multi-domain data clustering method, to rise to this year’s newly proposed multi-domain test set challenge. For low-resource scenarios, we build a multi-language translation model to enhance the performance, and try to use the pre-trained language model (mBERT) to initialize the translation model.

2021

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The NiuTrans System for the WMT 2021 Efficiency Task
Chenglong Wang | Chi Hu | Yongyu Mu | Zhongxiang Yan | Siming Wu | Yimin Hu | Hang Cao | Bei Li | Ye Lin | Tong Xiao | Jingbo Zhu
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Machine Translation

This paper describes the NiuTrans system for the WMT21 translation efficiency task. Following last year’s work, we explore various techniques to improve the efficiency while maintaining translation quality. We investigate the combinations of lightweight Transformer architectures and knowledge distillation strategies. Also, we improve the translation efficiency with graph optimization, low precision, dynamic batching, and parallel pre/post-processing. Putting these together, our system can translate 247,000 words per second on an NVIDIA A100, being 3× faster than our last year’s system. Our system is the fastest and has the lowest memory consumption on the GPU-throughput track. The code, model, and pipeline will be available at NiuTrans.NMT.