Related papers: Learning Which Features Matter: RoBERTa Acquires a…

Pre-training by language modeling has become a popular and successful approach to NLP tasks, but we have yet to understand exactly what linguistic capacities these pre-training processes confer upon models. In this paper we introduce a…

Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of…

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Pretrained masked language models (MLMs) require finetuning for most NLP tasks. Instead, we evaluate MLMs out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood scores (PLLs), which are computed by masking tokens one by one. We show that PLLs…

Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…

Progress in natural language processing (NLP) models that estimate representations of word sequences has recently been leveraged to improve the understanding of language processing in the brain. However, these models have not been…

Recent state-of-the-art language models utilize a two-phase training procedure comprised of (i) unsupervised pre-training on unlabeled text, and (ii) fine-tuning for a specific supervised task. More recently, many studies have been focused…

Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on…

Recently, the pre-trained language model, BERT (and its robustly optimized version RoBERTa), has attracted a lot of attention in natural language understanding (NLU), and achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in various NLU tasks, such as…

Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these…

Modern pre-trained language models are mostly built upon backbones stacking self-attention and feed-forward layers in an interleaved order. In this paper, beyond this stereotyped layer pattern, we aim to improve pre-trained models by…

Language models can store vast factual knowledge, yet their ability to flexibly use this knowledge for downstream tasks (e.g., via instruction finetuning) remains questionable. This paper investigates four fundamental knowledge manipulation…

It's been said that "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners." Indeed, self-supervised language models trained on "positive" examples of English text generalize in desirable ways to many natural language tasks. But if such…

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) have been shown to possess significant linguistic, common sense, and factual knowledge. One form of knowledge that has not been studied yet in this context is information about the scalar magnitudes of…

We introduce a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models. Unlike previous approaches that finetune the models with task-specific augmentation, we pretrain language models on a collection of task-agnostic…

Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated…

Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…

Prior work has found that pretrained language models (LMs) fine-tuned with different random seeds can achieve similar in-domain performance but generalize differently on tests of syntactic generalization. In this work, we show that, even…

Speech foundation models, such as HuBERT and its variants, are pre-trained on large amounts of unlabeled speech data and then used for a range of downstream tasks. These models use a masked prediction objective, where the model learns to…