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Large-scale pre-training has been proven to be crucial for various computer vision tasks. However, with the increase of pre-training data amount, model architecture amount, and the private/inaccessible data, it is not very efficient or…

Textual representation learners trained on large amounts of data have achieved notable success on downstream tasks; intriguingly, they have also performed well on challenging tests of syntactic competence. Given this success, it remains an…

Deep learning techniques have achieved great success in many fields, while at the same time deep learning models are getting more complex and expensive to compute. It severely hinders the wide applications of these models. In order to…

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained code models such as CodeBERT on downstream tasks has achieved great success in many software testing and analysis tasks. While effective and prevalent, fine-tuning the pre-trained parameters incurs a large…

Dataset Distillation (DD) is a prominent technique that encapsulates knowledge from a large-scale original dataset into a small synthetic dataset for efficient training. Meanwhile, Pre-trained Models (PTMs) function as knowledge…

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…

Small Language models (SLMs) offer an efficient and accessible alternative to Large Language Models (LLMs), delivering strong performance while using far fewer resources. We introduce a simple and effective framework for pretraining SLMs…

Knowledge distillation is the procedure of transferring "knowledge" from a large model (the teacher) to a more compact one (the student), often being used in the context of model compression. When both models have the same architecture,…

Recently, large-scale pre-trained models have shown their advantages in many tasks. However, due to the huge computational complexity and storage requirements, it is challenging to apply the large-scale model to real scenes. A common…

Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is…

Traditionally, distillation has been used to train a student model to emulate the input/output functionality of a teacher. A more useful goal than emulation, yet under-explored, is for the student to learn feature representations that…

Large-scale language models have recently demonstrated impressive empirical performance. Nevertheless, the improved results are attained at the price of bigger models, more power consumption, and slower inference, which hinder their…

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimization. While existing methods often rely on expensive human…

Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap:…

Recent breakthroughs of pretrained language models have shown the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In addition to standard syntactic and semantic NLP tasks, pretrained…

Pre-trained multilingual language models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in cross-lingual transfer, but they often lead to an inequitable representation of languages due to limited capacity, skewed pre-training data, and…

Improving pretraining data quality and size is known to boost downstream performance, but the role of text complexity--how hard a text is to read--remains less explored. We reduce surface-level complexity (shorter sentences, simpler words,…

Recent state-of-the-art approaches to summarization utilize large pre-trained Transformer models. Distilling these models to smaller student models has become critically important for practical use; however there are many different…

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has achieved remarkable results in many NLP tasks. However, it is unclear why the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm can improve performance and generalization capability across different…

The multilingual pre-trained language models (e.g, mBERT, XLM and XLM-R) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, these models are computationally intensive and difficult to be…