It seems like Zero-Shot Classification should be impossible, right? How could a machine learning model classify an object with a label that it has never seen before?

Traditional classification involves lots of labeled examples, but the trained model is limited to the set of labels from the training set. How, on earth, could we train a model to emit a label that is completely novel? With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a new path on this quixotic quest. Numerous problems are being tackled creatively through prompt engineering of the input to these models, from coaxing out the perfect image from DALL-E or learning to beat humans in conversational games (for example: Cicero). By following these lateral uses of the model, we can find our way to classifying objects with labels the model has never seen before.

Business Problem

A core function of accounting is proper labeling (aka "coding") of transactions. The accuracy of this step is crucial for building actionable financial reports for the stakeholders of a company. The process of labeling each individual transaction that crosses a company’s books is painstaking and traditionally very manual. More recently, tools have been developed to bucketize some subset of transactions via some hand-crafted heuristics based on the vendor or the description of the transaction. But these tools often fall short as they don’t have enough information to accurately label them automatically. For the transactions that fall through, the accountant must manually triage each one. Often, the accountant must seek further clarification from the client about the transaction, such as what was purchased, or the intended use of the item, or even who was present, to make an accurate decision on how to book it.

Machine learning is perhaps an obvious tool to aid this flow, but it does run into trouble. Within the accounting world, the labels chosen for transactions are consistent per accountant/client relationship but often globally inconsistent. So, what helps speed one accountant becomes a roadblock for another.

Similarity as First Pass

As we’ve talked about in other blog posts (part 1 and part 2 ), we use the similarity of generated embeddings to automatically label transactions. By casting a transaction description to a vector via a trained embedding model, we can find highly-similar transactions and then look up how they were labeled by the accountant (or other algorithms) in the past. But this falls down in 2 main cases.

1. A common transaction, easily identifiable, is attributed to multiple use cases, such as an Amazon purchase. It could be practically any label as Amazon sells such a diverse range of products.
2. A completely unidentifiable transaction, such as a check or an unlabeled invoice.

Both of these cases could return multiple possible labels via the similarity approach, just as an accountant may mentally call up the common past labels for this type of expense.

The next step in many accountants’ workflow is to seek out more information from the client. Through the responses, the accountant hopes to gather enough context to correctly label the transaction in the books. Here is where Zero-Shot Classification can help!

ChatGPT, one of the largest and most sophisticated language models ever created, has recently become a household topic of conversation. If you've been wondering how this incredible technology can be applied to the accounting and finance space, this is the article for you :)

Welcome to chapter two of our three-part series on machine learning! We kicked off with an introduction to similarity-based machine learning, and how we apply it to accounting use cases at Digits. Today, let's explore generative machine learning and what it can bring to the accounting world.

Generative machine learning has received significant attention because it opens up a completely new field of "AI". It is getting closer to fulfilling the human dream of teaching machines some form of “creativity.” Model architectures like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and T5 have provided solutions to various problems including writing text, generating photo-realistic images, and summarizing complex topics. In this blog post, we are excited to explore machine learning for natural language generation and how we are using these concepts today at Digits.

What is Generative Machine Learning?

Traditionally, machine learning has been applied to classification problems, where you take some text and distill it into different buckets or categories. You can think of the text as being "encoded" into those categories. For years, the dream has been to push beyond that, and train a machine learning model that can actually generate text, rather that just classify it. How might that work?

Researchers began building on this approach by experimenting with model architectures that first reduce information through a model encoder and then “decompress” the information back into human-readable text through a decoder. They made a significant breakthrough in 2017 when they presented an encoder-decoder model architecture called Transformer.

The model architecture shown above shows the encoder (left side) – decoder (right side) structure. Over the last few years, researchers further refined this architecture by increasing the number of model weights, which allows capturing more “knowledge” into the model, and by fine-tuning the decoder side to respond to decoder “instructions.” The fact that models can now use “instructions” as model inputs unlocked meta-learning, where a model can generate text for untrained scenarios. For example, we can train a model on translating English-German and English-French, and through “instructions,” the model can then be prompted to translate between German and French.

To generate text for a given input text, the decoder model uses the reduced information as an embedding it obtains from the encoder and the initial instruction to generate the first-word token for the generated text. Then it uses the newly generated token together with the instructions and the embedding to generate the second-word token for the text. This generation loop continues until the decoder has reached its maximum sequence lengths (usually 512 or 1024 tokens) or the decoder produces a stop-token instructing the decoder that any text generated following is considered padding. The generated text will then reflect the model’s response to the input text and the given instruction. Here is an example:

Just last year, we released Boost to help accountants save time by automating their work. Boost instantly spots inconsistencies in their clients' ledgers, saving time and embarrassment! Every second, Digits sifts through every single transaction and performs a deep analysis. Boost alerts accountants if it finds errors like transactions in unexpected categories and suggests categories for transactions with missing categories.

The simplicity of the product is thanks to the powerful technology we built to make this possible.

With this three-part series, Digits’ Machine Learning team provides a look behind the scenes at how it works.

In this first blog post, we will explain why machine learning is crucial for accounting and how we detect categories for banking transactions with similarity-based machine learning models. In parts two and three, we will dive into how we use machine learning to accelerate the interactions between accountants and their clients.

Why Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a versatile tool for many applications, including accounting. For example, if we want to categorize transactions correctly, we can look at similar transactions and mimic their existing categorizations. We could find highly-similar transactions through traditional statistical methods like determining the Levenshtein distance between the transaction descriptions, but those methods would have failed in the following scenarios:

Because of the number of failure cases of traditional statistical methods, we decided to develop a custom machine learning-based solution.