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--- nlp:open_problems [2021/03/01 08:13] – jmflanig
+++ nlp:open_problems [2023/06/15 07:36] (current) – external edit 127.0.0.1
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 ====== Open Problems ======
 Partial list of open problems in NLP.
+==== Explainability ====
+  * Explainability is an open problem in machine learning and NLP.  See [[Explainability]].
 ==== Machine Translation ====
   * [[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03872.pdf|Koehn & Knowles 2017 - Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation]]
+==== Transformers ====
+  * Transformers are hard to train ([[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.08249.pdf|Liu et al 2020 - Understanding the Difficulty of Training Transformers]]), and often we can't even get them to overfit and just train a long as we can.  This isn't a good situation, and shows there is some issue with the normalization, the initializer, or the optimizer.  Feedforward, CNN, and RNNS had this issue for a long time, and these issues were fixed with Glorot initialization, batch normalization, and layer normalization.  The open problem is: **what are the optimal initialization and normalization procedures for the Transformer?**
+===== Problems Jeff Thinks are Open Problems =====
+These ones are Jeff's opinion.
 ==== Pre-training ====
   * **Are there simpler, faster methods for contextualized representations than pre-training Transformers?** Historically, complex methods have been invented before researchers find simpler ways to do a similar thing.  For example, there were methods for pre-training word embeddings that did not scale well until Tomas Mikolov asked the question "Is there a more efficient way to do this?" and invented the skip-gram model ([[paper:Mikolov 2013 - Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space]] and follow-up work).  It is an open question if we are in a similar situation with Transformer models and contextualized pre-training today.
-==== Explainability ====
-  * Explainability is an open problem in machine learning and NLP.  See [[explainability]].