Related papers: Rethinking Why Intermediate-Task Fine-Tuning Works

While pretrained models such as BERT have shown large gains across natural language understanding tasks, their performance can be improved by further training the model on a data-rich intermediate task, before fine-tuning it on a target…

Transfer learning (TL) in natural language processing (NLP) has seen a surge of interest in recent years, as pre-trained models have shown an impressive ability to transfer to novel tasks. Three main strategies have emerged for making use…

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…

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…

Fine-tuning pretrained language models has shown promising results on a wide range of tasks, but when encountering a novel task, do they rely more on generic pretrained representation, or develop brand new task-specific solutions? Here, we…

Intermediate task fine-tuning has been shown to culminate in large transfer gains across many NLP tasks. With an abundance of candidate datasets as well as pre-trained language models, it has become infeasible to run the cross-product of…

Pre-trained models have been shown effective in many code intelligence tasks. These models are pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus and then fine-tuned in downstream tasks. However, as the inputs to pre-training and downstream tasks…

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models for downstream tasks has become a norm for NLP. Recently it is found that intermediate training based on high-level inference tasks such as Question Answering (QA) can improve the performance of some…

Language models (LMs) have recently shown remarkable performance on reasoning tasks by explicitly generating intermediate inferences, e.g., chain-of-thought prompting. However, these intermediate inference steps may be inappropriate…

Pretraining sentence encoders with language modeling and related unsupervised tasks has recently been shown to be very effective for language understanding tasks. By supplementing language model-style pretraining with further training on…

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained language models (e.g., multilingual BERT) to downstream cross-lingual tasks has shown promising results. However, the fine-tuning process inevitably changes the parameters of the pre-trained model and…

Self-training (ST) is a simple yet effective semi-supervised learning method. However, why and how ST improves generalization performance by using potentially erroneous pseudo-labels is still not well understood. To deepen the understanding…

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…

In real-world scenarios, a text classification task often begins with a cold start, when labeled data is scarce. In such cases, the common practice of fine-tuning pre-trained models, such as BERT, for a target classification task, is prone…

Instruction Fine-tuning~(IFT) is a critical phase in building large language models~(LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT's role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the…

We compare sequential fine-tuning with a model for multi-task learning in the context where we are interested in boosting performance on two tasks, one of which depends on the other. We test these models on the FigLang2022 shared task which…

Multi-task learning is to improve the performance of the model by transferring and exploiting common knowledge among tasks. Existing MTL works mainly focus on the scenario where label sets among multiple tasks (MTs) are usually the same,…

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (LMs) without making any architectural changes has become a norm for learning various language downstream tasks. However, for non-language downstream tasks, a common practice is to employ task-specific…

NMT systems trained on Pre-trained Multilingual Sequence-Sequence (PMSS) models flounder when sufficient amounts of parallel data is not available for fine-tuning. This specifically holds for languages missing/under-represented in these…

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task…