Related papers: Unmasking the Mask -- Evaluating Social Biases in …

Transformer language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for a variety of natural language tasks but have been shown to encode unwanted biases. We evaluate the social biases encoded by transformers trained with the masked…

Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a helpful pretraining objective for powerful language models such as PaLM2. After training, such masked language models (MLMs) can provide distributions of tokens in the…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is one of the key sub-tasks in vision-language pretraining. In the cross-modal setting, tokens in the sentence are masked at random, and the model predicts the masked tokens given the image and the text. In…

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) models demands a thorough investigation of biases and risks inherent in these models to understand their impact on individuals and society. This study extends the focus of bias evaluation…

Bias is a disproportionate prejudice in favor of one side against another. Due to the success of transformer-based Masked Language Models (MLMs) and their impact on many NLP tasks, a systematic evaluation of bias in these models is needed…

Masked Language Models (MLMs) pre-trained by predicting masked tokens on large corpora have been used successfully in natural language processing tasks for a variety of languages. Unfortunately, it was reported that MLMs also learn…

Estimating the log-likelihood of a given sentence under an autoregressive language model is straightforward: one can simply apply the chain rule and sum the log-likelihood values for each successive token. However, for masked language…

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…

The wide adoption and application of Masked language models~(MLMs) on sensitive data (from legal to medical) necessitates a thorough quantitative investigation into their privacy vulnerabilities -- to what extent do MLMs leak information…

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have been successful in many natural language processing tasks. However, real-world stereotype biases are likely to be reflected in MLMs due to their learning from large text corpora. Most of the evaluation…

Masked language models (MLMs) conventionally mask 15% of tokens due to the belief that more masking would leave insufficient context to learn good representations; this masking rate has been widely used, regardless of model sizes or masking…

We study the relationship between task-agnostic intrinsic and task-specific extrinsic social bias evaluation measures for Masked Language Models (MLMs), and find that there exists only a weak correlation between these two types of…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been one of the most prominent approaches for pretraining bidirectional text encoders due to its simplicity and effectiveness. One notable concern about MLM is that the special $\texttt{[MASK]}$ symbol…

Various types of social biases have been reported with pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) in prior work. However, multiple underlying factors are associated with an MLM such as its model size, size of the training data, training…

Language models (LMs) have become pivotal in the realm of technological advancements. While their capabilities are vast and transformative, they often include societal biases encoded in the human-produced datasets used for their training.…

Due to the implement of guardrails by developers, Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in explicit bias tests. However, bias in LLMs may occur not only explicitly, but also implicitly, much like humans who…

Many evaluation measures are used to evaluate social biases in masked language models (MLMs). However, we find that these previously proposed evaluation measures are lacking robustness in scenarios with limited datasets. This is because…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective, where a model needs to predict an original token that is replaced with a mask given contexts. Although simpler and computationally efficient pretraining…

We describe our strategy for the 2025 edition of the BabyLM Challenge. Our main contribution is that of an improved form of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), which adapts the probabilities of the tokens masked according to the model's ability…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has proven to be an essential component of Vision-Language (VL) pretraining. To implement MLM, the researcher must make two design choices: the masking strategy, which determines which tokens to mask, and the…