Quality Matters: Evaluating Synthetic Data for Tool-Using LLMs

Training large language models (LLMs) for external tool usage is a rapidly expanding field, with recent research focusing on generating synthetic data to address the shortage of available data. However, the absence of systematic data quality checks poses complications for properly training and testing models. To that end, we propose two approaches for assessing the reliability of data for training LLMs to use external tools. The first approach uses intuitive, human-defined correctness criteria. The second approach uses a model-driven assessment with in-context evaluation. We conduct a thorough evaluation of data quality on two popular benchmarks, followed by an extrinsic evaluation that showcases the impact of data quality on model performance. Our results demonstrate that models trained on high-quality data outperform those trained on unvalidated data, even when trained with a smaller quantity of data. These findings empirically support the significance of assessing and ensuring the reliability of training data for tool-using LLMs.

Uncovering Drift in Textual Data: An Unsupervised Method for Detecting and Mitigating Drift in Machine Learning Models

Drift in machine learning refers to the phenomenon where the statistical properties of data or context, in which the model operates, change over time leading to a decrease in its performance. Therefore, maintaining a constant monitoring process for machine learning model performance is crucial in order to proactively prevent any potential performance regression. However, supervised drift detection methods require human annotation and consequently lead to a longer time to detect and mitigate the drift. In our proposed unsupervised drift detection method, we follow a two step process. Our first step involves encoding a sample of production data as the target distribution, and the model training data as the reference distribution. In the second step, we employ a kernel-based statistical test that utilizes the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance metric to compare the reference and target distributions and estimate any potential drift. Our method also identifies the subset of production data that is the root cause of the drift. The models retrained using these identified high drift samples show improved performance on online customer experience quality metrics.

Improving language models fine-tuning with representation consistency targets

Fine-tuning contextualized representations learned by pre-trained language models has become a standard practice in the NLP field. However, pre-trained representations are prone to degradation (also known as representation collapse) during fine-tuning, which leads to instability, suboptimal performance, and weak generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning method that avoids representation collapse during fine-tuning by discouraging undesirable changes in the representations. We show that our approach matches or exceeds the performance of the existing regularization-based fine-tuning methods across 13 language understanding tasks (GLUE benchmark and six additional datasets). We also demonstrate its effectiveness in low-data settings and robustness to label perturbation. Furthermore, we extend previous studies of representation collapse and propose several metrics to quantify it. Using these metrics and previously proposed experiments, we show that our approach obtains significant improvements in retaining the expressive power of representations.

Pyramid-BERT: Reducing Complexity via Successive Core-set based Token Selection

Transformer-based language models such as BERT have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks, but are computationally prohibitive. A recent line of works use various heuristics to successively shorten sequence length while transforming tokens through encoders, in tasks such as classification and ranking that require a single token embedding for prediction. We present a novel solution to this problem, called Pyramid-BERT where we replace previously used heuristics with a {\em core-set} based token selection method justified by theoretical results. The core-set based token selection technique allows us to avoid expensive pre-training, gives a space-efficient fine tuning, and thus makes it suitable to handle longer sequence lengths. We provide extensive experiments establishing advantages of pyramid BERT over several baselines and existing works on the GLUE benchmarks and Long Range Arena datasets.

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor: A System for Real-Time Insights into Deployed Machine Learning Models

With the increasing adoption of machine learning (ML) models and systems in high-stakes settings across different industries, guaranteeing a model's performance after deployment has become crucial. Monitoring models in production is a critical aspect of ensuring their continued performance and reliability. We present Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor, a fully managed service that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models hosted on Amazon SageMaker. Our system automatically detects data, concept, bias, and feature attribution drift in models in real-time and provides alerts so that model owners can take corrective actions and thereby maintain high quality models. We describe the key requirements obtained from customers, system design and architecture, and methodology for detecting different types of drift. Further, we provide quantitative evaluations followed by use cases, insights, and lessons learned from more than 1.5 years of production deployment.

Improving Early Sepsis Prediction with Multi Modal Learning

Sepsis is a life-threatening disease with high morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs. The early prediction and administration of antibiotics and intravenous fluids is considered crucial for the treatment of sepsis and can save potentially millions of lives and billions in health care costs. Professional clinical care practitioners have proposed clinical criterion which aid in early detection of sepsis; however, performance of these criterion is often limited. Clinical text provides essential information to estimate the severity of the sepsis in addition to structured clinical data. In this study, we explore how clinical text can complement structured data towards early sepsis prediction task. In this paper, we propose multi modal model which incorporates both structured data in the form of patient measurements as well as textual notes on the patient. We employ state-of-the-art NLP models such as BERT and a highly specialized NLP model in Amazon Comprehend Medical to represent the text. On the MIMIC-III dataset containing records of ICU admissions, we show that by using these notes, one achieves an improvement of 6.07 points in a standard utility score for Sepsis prediction and 2.89% in AUROC score. Our methods significantly outperforms a clinical criteria suggested by experts, qSOFA, as well as the winning model of the PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge for predicting Sepsis.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot: a white box AutoML solution at scale

AutoML systems provide a black-box solution to machine learning problems by selecting the right way of processing features, choosing an algorithm and tuning the hyperparameters of the entire pipeline. Although these systems perform well on many datasets, there is still a non-negligible number of datasets for which the one-shot solution produced by each particular system would provide sub-par performance. In this paper, we present Amazon SageMaker Autopilot: a fully managed system providing an automated ML solution that can be modified when needed. Given a tabular dataset and the target column name, Autopilot identifies the problem type, analyzes the data and produces a diverse set of complete ML pipelines including feature preprocessing and ML algorithms, which are tuned to generate a leaderboard of candidate models. In the scenario where the performance is not satisfactory, a data scientist is able to view and edit the proposed ML pipelines in order to infuse their expertise and business knowledge without having to revert to a fully manual solution. This paper describes the different components of Autopilot, emphasizing the infrastructure choices that allow scalability, high quality models, editable ML pipelines, consumption of artifacts of offline meta-learning, and a convenient integration with the entire SageMaker suite allowing these trained models to be used in a production setting.

TabTransformer: Tabular Data Modeling Using Contextual Embeddings

We propose TabTransformer, a novel deep tabular data modeling architecture for supervised and semi-supervised learning. The TabTransformer is built upon self-attention based Transformers. The Transformer layers transform the embeddings of categorical features into robust contextual embeddings to achieve higher prediction accuracy. Through extensive experiments on fifteen publicly available datasets, we show that the TabTransformer outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for tabular data by at least 1.0% on mean AUC, and matches the performance of tree-based ensemble models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the contextual embeddings learned from TabTransformer are highly robust against both missing and noisy data features, and provide better interpretability. Lastly, for the semi-supervised setting we develop an unsupervised pre-training procedure to learn data-driven contextual embeddings, resulting in an average 2.1% AUC lift over the state-of-the-art methods.

GANMEX: One-vs-One Attributions using GAN-based Model Explainability

Attribution methods have been shown as promising approaches for identifying key features that led to learned model predictions. While most existing attribution methods rely on a baseline input for performing feature perturbations, limited research has been conducted to address the baseline selection issues. Poor choices of baselines limit the ability of one-vs-one explanations for multi-class classifiers, which means the attribution methods were not able to explain why an input belongs to its original class but not the other specified target class. Achieving one-vs-one explanation is crucial when certain classes are more similar than others, e.g. two bird types among multiple animals, by focusing on key differentiating features rather than shared features across classes. In this paper, we present GANMEX, a novel approach applying Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) by incorporating the to-be-explained classifier as part of the adversarial networks. Our approach effectively selects the baseline as the closest realistic sample belong to the target class, which allows attribution methods to provide true one-vs-one explanations. We showed that GANMEX baselines improved the saliency maps and led to stronger performance on perturbation-based evaluation metrics over the existing baselines. Existing attribution results are known for being insensitive to model randomization, and we demonstrated that GANMEX baselines led to better outcome under the cascading randomization of the model.

Practical and sample efficient zero-shot HPO

Zero-shot hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is a simple yet effective use of transfer learning for constructing a small list of hyperparameter (HP) configurations that complement each other. That is to say, for any given dataset, at least one of them is expected to perform well. Current techniques for obtaining this list are computationally expensive as they rely on running training jobs on a diverse collection of datasets and a large collection of randomly drawn HPs. This cost is especially problematic in environments where the space of HPs is regularly changing due to new algorithm versions, or changing architectures of deep networks. We provide an overview of available approaches and introduce two novel techniques to handle the problem. The first is based on a surrogate model and adaptively chooses pairs of dataset, configuration to query. The second, for settings where finding, tuning and testing a surrogate model is problematic, is a multi-fidelity technique combining HyperBand with submodular optimization. We benchmark our methods experimentally on five tasks (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, MLP and AutoML) and show significant improvement in accuracy compared to standard zero-shot HPO with the same training budget. In addition to contributing new algorithms, we provide an extensive study of the zero-shot HPO technique resulting in (1) default hyper-parameters for popular algorithms that would benefit the community using them, (2) massive lookup tables to further the research of hyper-parameter tuning.