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The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…

Though the transformer architectures have shown dominance in many natural language understanding tasks, there are still unsolved issues for the training of transformer models, especially the need for a principled way of warm-up which has…

With the burgeoning amount of data of image-text pairs and diversity of Vision-and-Language (V\&L) tasks, scholars have introduced an abundance of deep learning models in this research domain. Furthermore, in recent years, transfer learning…

To better support retrieval applications such as web search and question answering, growing effort is made to develop retrieval-oriented language models. Most of the existing works focus on improving the semantic representation capability…

Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which…

Information retrieval systems are crucial for enabling effective access to large document collections. Recent approaches have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance retrieval performance through query augmentation, but often rely…

Due to limited supervised training data, large language models (LLMs) are typically pre-trained via a self-supervised "predict the next word" objective on a vast amount of unstructured text data. To make the resulting model useful to users,…

We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with…

State-of-the-art neural language models can now be used to solve ad-hoc language tasks through zero-shot prompting without the need for supervised training. This approach has gained popularity in recent years, and researchers have…

Pre-training a large transformer model on a massive amount of unlabeled data and fine-tuning it on labeled datasets for diverse downstream tasks has proven to be a successful strategy, for a variety of vision and natural language processing…

This paper proposes a novel approach to pre-train encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model with unpaired speech and transcripts respectively. Our pre-training method is divided into two stages, named acoustic pre-trianing and…

The primary goal of ad-hoc retrieval (document retrieval in the context of question answering) is to find relevant documents satisfied the information need posted in a natural language query. It requires a good understanding of the query…

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence.…

In-context learning (ICL), teaching a large language model (LLM) to perform a task with few-shot demonstrations rather than adjusting the model parameters, has emerged as a strong paradigm for using LLMs. While early studies primarily used…

Training deep neural networks from scratch on natural language processing (NLP) tasks requires significant amount of manually labeled text corpus and substantial time to converge, which usually cannot be satisfied by the customers. In this…

In the competitive landscape of sponsored search, balancing retrieval quality with production latency is a critical challenge. While large retrieval models based on Small Language Models (SLMs) such as Qwen3-Embedding-4B/8B set strong upper…

Language models can be viewed as functions that embed text into Euclidean space, where the quality of the embedding vectors directly determines model performance, training such neural networks involves various uncertainties. This paper…

Pre-trained language models have recently emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning a variety of language tasks. Ideally, when models are pre-trained on large amount of data, they are expected to gain implicit knowledge. In this paper, we…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to learn in-context, allowing them to perform various tasks based on a few input-output examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is heavily reliant on the…

Pre-training language models (LMs) on large-scale unlabeled text data makes the model much easier to achieve exceptional downstream performance than their counterparts directly trained on the downstream tasks. In this work, we study what…