Related papers: TaCL: Improving BERT Pre-training with Token-aware…

Multilingual Pre-trained Language models (multiPLMs), trained on the Masked Language Modelling (MLM) objective are commonly being used for cross-lingual tasks such as bitext mining. However, the performance of these models is still…

ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous…

Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations, but incurs substantial training costs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-based curriculum masking (CCM) method to…

Pre-trained multilingual language models such as mBERT have shown immense gains for several natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially in the zero-shot cross-lingual setting. Most, if not all, of these pre-trained models rely on…

Pre-trained text encoders such as BERT and its variants have recently achieved state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks. While being effective, these pre-training methods typically demand massive computation resources. To accelerate…

Pre-trained contextual representations (e.g., BERT) have become the foundation to achieve state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. However, large-scale pre-training is computationally expensive. ELECTRA, an early attempt to accelerate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, especially when equipped with long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, eliciting long CoT typically requires large-scale reinforcement…

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks, and consecutive variants have been proposed to further improve the performance of the pre-trained language models. In…

Pre-training large language models on genomic sequences is a powerful approach for learning biologically meaningful representations. Masked language modeling (MLM) methods, such as DNABERT and Nucleotide Transformer (NT), achieve strong…

The principle that governs unsupervised multilingual learning (UCL) in jointly trained language models (mBERT as a popular example) is still being debated. Many find it surprising that one can achieve UCL with multiple monolingual corpora.…

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…

Using token representation from bidirectional language models (LMs) such as BERT is still a widely used approach for token-classification tasks. Even though there exist much larger unidirectional LMs such as Llama-2, they are rarely used to…

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a promising technology to bridge the communication gap between the deaf and the hearing people. Recently, researchers have adopted Neural Machine Translation (NMT) methods, which usually require…

Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models such as BERT improve robustness to spurious correlations in the dataset. Intrigued by these results, we find that the key to their success is generalization from a small amount of…

This paper presents a novel training method, Conditional Masked Language Modeling (CMLM), to effectively learn sentence representations on large scale unlabeled corpora. CMLM integrates sentence representation learning into MLM training by…

Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of pretrained language models (LMs) for text-based natural language (NL) understanding tasks. Such models are typically trained on free-form NL text, hence may not be suitable for tasks like…

Although BERT and its variants have reshaped the NLP landscape, it still remains unclear how best to derive sentence embeddings from such pre-trained Transformers. In this work, we propose a contrastive learning method that utilizes…

This thesis focuses on improving the pre-training of natural language models using unsupervised raw data to make them more efficient and aligned with downstream applications. In the first part, we introduce three alternative pre-training…

Semi-supervised action recognition aims to improve spatio-temporal reasoning ability with a few labeled data in conjunction with a large amount of unlabeled data. Albeit recent advancements, existing powerful methods are still prone to…

Pretrained language models such as BERT, GPT have shown great effectiveness in language understanding. The auxiliary predictive tasks in existing pretraining approaches are mostly defined on tokens, thus may not be able to capture…