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State-of-the-art performance on language understanding tasks is now achieved with increasingly large networks; the current record holder has billions of parameters. Given a language model pre-trained on massive unlabeled text corpora, only…

Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…

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…

How does language model pretraining help transfer learning? We consider a simple ablation technique for determining the impact of each pretrained layer on transfer task performance. This method, partial reinitialization, involves replacing…

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…

When fine-tuning BERT models for specific tasks, it is common to select part of the final layer's output and input it into a newly created fully connected layer. However, it remains unclear which part of the final layer should be selected…

Despite the success of fine-tuning pretrained language encoders like BERT for downstream natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, it is still poorly understood how neural networks change after fine-tuning. In this work, we use centered…

Self-supervised pre-training of large-scale transformer models on text corpora followed by finetuning has achieved state-of-the-art on a number of natural language processing tasks. Recently, Lu et al. (2021, arXiv:2103.05247) claimed that…

Pretrained language models demonstrate strong performance in most NLP tasks when fine-tuned on small task-specific datasets. Hence, these autoregressive models constitute ideal agents to operate in text-based environments where language…

Efficient finetuning of pretrained language transformers is becoming increasingly prevalent for solving natural language processing tasks. While effective, it can still require a large number of tunable parameters. This can be a drawback…

Fine-tuning BERT-based models is resource-intensive in memory, computation, and time. While many prior works aim to improve inference efficiency via compression techniques, e.g., pruning, these works do not explicitly address the…

The introduction of pre-trained language models has revolutionized natural language research communities. However, researchers still know relatively little regarding their theoretical and empirical properties. In this regard, Peters et al.…

NLP is currently dominated by general-purpose pretrained language models like RoBERTa, which achieve strong performance on NLU tasks through pretraining on billions of words. But what exact knowledge or skills do Transformer LMs learn from…

Transformer-based pretrained models like BERT, GPT-2 and T5 have been finetuned for a large number of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and have been shown to be very effective. However, while finetuning, what changes across layers…

Transformer-based NLP models are trained using hundreds of millions or even billions of parameters, limiting their applicability in computationally constrained environments. While the number of parameters generally correlates with…

In recent times, BERT-based models have been extremely successful in solving a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as reading comprehension, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, etc. All BERT-based…

Finetuning language models (LMs) is crucial for adapting the models to downstream data and tasks. However, full finetuning is usually costly. Existing work, such as parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT), often focuses on \textit{how to…

Parameter-efficient tuning aims at updating only a small subset of parameters when adapting a pretrained model to downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce PASTA, in which we only modify the special token representations (e.g., [SEP] and…

Fine-tuning pre-trained contextualized embedding models has become an integral part of the NLP pipeline. At the same time, probing has emerged as a way to investigate the linguistic knowledge captured by pre-trained models. Very little is,…

We propose pre-finetuning, an additional large-scale learning stage between language model pre-training and fine-tuning. Pre-finetuning is massively multi-task learning (around 50 datasets, over 4.8 million total labeled examples), and is…