Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Calibrating Likelihoods towards Consistency in Summarization Models

Despite the recent advances in abstractive text summarization, current summarization models still suffer from generating factually inconsistent summaries, reducing their utility for real-world application. We argue that the main reason for such behavior is that the summarization models trained with maximum likelihood objective assign high probability to plausible sequences given the context, but they often do not accurately rank sequences by their consistency. In this work, we solve this problem by calibrating the likelihood of model generated sequences to better align with a consistency metric measured by natural language inference (NLI) models. The human evaluation study and automatic metrics show that the calibrated models generate more consistent and higher-quality summaries. We also show that the models trained using our method return probabilities that are better aligned with the NLI scores, which significantly increase reliability of summarization models.

Theoretical and Practical Perspectives on what Influence Functions Do

Influence functions (IF) have been seen as a technique for explaining model predictions through the lens of the training data. Their utility is assumed to be in identifying training examples "responsible" for a prediction so that, for example, correcting a prediction is possible by intervening on those examples (removing or editing them) and retraining the model. However, recent empirical studies have shown that the existing methods of estimating IF predict the leave-one-out-and-retrain effect poorly. In order to understand the mismatch between the theoretical promise and the practical results, we analyse five assumptions made by IF methods which are problematic for modern-scale deep neural networks and which concern convexity, numeric stability, training trajectory and parameter divergence. This allows us to clarify what can be expected theoretically from IF. We show that while most assumptions can be addressed successfully, the parameter divergence poses a clear limitation on the predictive power of IF: influence fades over training time even with deterministic training. We illustrate this theoretical result with BERT and ResNet models. Another conclusion from the theoretical analysis is that IF are still useful for model debugging and correcting even though some of the assumptions made in prior work do not hold: using natural language processing and computer vision tasks, we verify that mis-predictions can be successfully corrected by taking only a few fine-tuning steps on influential examples.

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study

Modern deep models for summarization attains impressive benchmark performance, but they are prone to generating miscalibrated predictive uncertainty. This means that they assign high confidence to low-quality predictions, leading to compromised reliability and trustworthiness in real-world applications. Probabilistic deep learning methods are common solutions to the miscalibration problem. However, their relative effectiveness in complex autoregressive summarization tasks are not well-understood. In this work, we thoroughly investigate different state-of-the-art probabilistic methods' effectiveness in improving the uncertainty quality of the neural summarization models, across three large-scale benchmarks with varying difficulty. We show that the probabilistic methods consistently improve the model's generation and uncertainty quality, leading to improved selective generation performance (i.e., abstaining from low-quality summaries) in practice. We also reveal notable failure patterns of probabilistic methods widely-adopted in NLP community (e.g., Deep Ensemble and Monte Carlo Dropout), cautioning the importance of choosing appropriate method for the data setting.

Breaking BERT: Evaluating and Optimizing Sparsified Attention

Transformers allow attention between all pairs of tokens, but there is reason to believe that most of these connections - and their quadratic time and memory - may not be necessary. But which ones? We evaluate the impact of sparsification patterns with a series of ablation experiments. First, we compare masks based on syntax, lexical similarity, and token position to random connections, and measure which patterns reduce performance the least. We find that on three common finetuning tasks even using attention that is at least 78% sparse can have little effect on performance if applied at later transformer layers, but that applying sparsity throughout the network reduces performance significantly. Second, we vary the degree of sparsity for three patterns supported by previous work, and find that connections to neighbouring tokens are the most significant. Finally, we treat sparsity as an optimizable parameter, and present an algorithm to learn degrees of neighboring connections that gives a fine-grained control over the accuracy-sparsity trade-off while approaching the performance of existing methods.

Scaling Up Influence Functions

We address efficient calculation of influence functions for tracking predictions back to the training data. We propose and analyze a new approach to speeding up the inverse Hessian calculation based on Arnoldi iteration. With this improvement, we achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the first successful implementation of influence functions that scales to full-size (language and vision) Transformer models with several hundreds of millions of parameters. We evaluate our approach on image classification and sequence-to-sequence tasks with tens to a hundred of millions of training examples. Our code will be available at https://github.com/google-research/jax-influence.

"Will You Find These Shortcuts?" A Protocol for Evaluating the Faithfulness of Input Salience Methods for Text Classification

Feature attribution a.k.a. input salience methods which assign an importance score to a feature are abundant but may produce surprisingly different results for the same model on the same input. While differences are expected if disparate definitions of importance are assumed, most methods claim to provide faithful attributions and point at the features most relevant for a model's prediction. Existing work on faithfulness evaluation is not conclusive and does not provide a clear answer as to how different methods are to be compared. Focusing on text classification and the model debugging scenario, our main contribution is a protocol for faithfulness evaluation that makes use of partially synthetic data to obtain ground truth for feature importance ranking. Following the protocol, we do an in-depth analysis of four standard salience method classes on a range of datasets and shortcuts for BERT and LSTM models and demonstrate that some of the most popular method configurations provide poor results even for simplest shortcuts. We recommend following the protocol for each new task and model combination to find the best method for identifying shortcuts.

Unsupervised Video Decomposition using Spatio-temporal Iterative Inference

Unsupervised multi-object scene decomposition is a fast-emerging problem in representation learning. Despite significant progress in static scenes, such models are unable to leverage important dynamic cues present in video. We propose a novel spatio-temporal iterative inference framework that is powerful enough to jointly model complex multi-object representations and explicit temporal dependencies between latent variables across frames. This is achieved by leveraging 2D-LSTM, temporally conditioned inference and generation within the iterative amortized inference for posterior refinement. Our method improves the overall quality of decompositions, encodes information about the objects' dynamics, and can be used to predict trajectories of each object separately. Additionally, we show that our model has a high accuracy even without color information. We demonstrate the decomposition, segmentation, and prediction capabilities of our model and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art on several benchmark datasets, one of which was curated for this work and will be made publicly available.

DwNet: Dense warp-based network for pose-guided human video generation

Generation of realistic high-resolution videos of human subjects is a challenging and important task in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on human motion transfer - generation of a video depicting a particular subject, observed in a single image, performing a series of motions exemplified by an auxiliary (driving) video. Our GAN-based architecture, DwNet, leverages dense intermediate pose-guided representation and refinement process to warp the required subject appearance, in the form of the texture, from a source image into a desired pose. Temporal consistency is maintained by further conditioning the decoding process within a GAN on the previously generated frame. In this way a video is generated in an iterative and recurrent fashion. We illustrate the efficacy of our approach by showing state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative performance on two benchmark datasets: TaiChi and Fashion Modeling. The latter is collected by us and will be made publicly available to the community.