Related papers: Should You Mask 15% in Masked Language Modeling?

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…

Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training models such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. This is an effective technique which has led to good results…

Most works on transformers trained with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective use the original BERT model's fixed masking rate of 15%. We propose to instead dynamically schedule the masking rate throughout training. We find that…

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been widely used as the denoising objective in pre-training language models (PrLMs). Existing PrLMs commonly adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy where a fixed masking ratio is applied and different…

Masked language modeling (MLM), a self-supervised pretraining objective, is widely used in natural language processing for learning text representations. MLM trains a model to predict a random sample of input tokens that have been replaced…

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…

Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is widely used to pretrain language models. The standard random masking strategy in MLM causes the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to be biased toward high-frequency tokens. Representation learning of rare…

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) 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…

Masked Language Model (MLM) framework has been widely adopted for self-supervised language pre-training. In this paper, we argue that randomly sampled masks in MLM would lead to undesirably large gradient variance. Thus, we theoretically…

Masking tokens uniformly at random constitutes a common flaw in the pretraining of Masked Language Models (MLMs) such as BERT. We show that such uniform masking allows an MLM to minimize its training objective by latching onto shallow local…

The current era of natural language processing (NLP) has been defined by the prominence of pre-trained language models since the advent of BERT. A feature of BERT and models with similar architecture is the objective of masked language…

Several pre-training objectives, such as masked language modeling (MLM), have been proposed to pre-train language models (e.g. BERT) with the aim of learning better language representations. However, to the best of our knowledge, no…

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…

Learning high-quality text representations is fundamental to a wide range of NLP tasks. While encoder pretraining has traditionally relied on Masked Language Modeling (MLM), recent evidence suggests that decoder models pretrained with…

In recent years, language models have drastically grown in size, and the abilities of these models have been shown to improve with scale. The majority of recent scaling laws studies focused on high-compute high-parameter count settings,…

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 Models (MLMs) have shown superior performances in numerous downstream NLP tasks when used as text encoders. Unfortunately, MLMs also demonstrate significantly worrying levels of social biases. We show that the previously…