Related papers: Effective Pre-Training Objectives for Transformer-…

The Transformer architecture deeply changed the natural language processing, outperforming all previous state-of-the-art models. However, well-known Transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-2 require a huge compute budget to create a…

Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training methods such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. While they produce good results when transferred to…

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…

Recent advances in Transformers have come with a huge requirement on computing resources, highlighting the importance of developing efficient training techniques to make Transformer training faster, at lower cost, and to higher accuracy by…

Transformer-based models generally allocate the same amount of computation for each token in a given sequence. We develop a simple but effective "token dropping" method to accelerate the pretraining of transformer models, such as BERT,…

The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in…

Pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks and benchmarks recently. Many state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs), however, do not scale well above the threshold of 512 input tokens. In specialized…

Pre-trained language models in the past years have shown exponential growth in model parameters and compute time. ELECTRA is a novel approach for improving the compute efficiency of pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT) based on masked…

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…

ELECTRA pre-trains language models by detecting tokens in a sequence that have been replaced by an auxiliary model. Although ELECTRA offers a significant boost in efficiency, its potential is constrained by the training cost brought by the…

Transformers have gained popularity in the software engineering (SE) literature. These deep learning models are usually pre-trained through a self-supervised objective, meant to provide the model with basic knowledge about a language of…

We introduce Electric, an energy-based cloze model for representation learning over text. Like BERT, it is a conditional generative model of tokens given their contexts. However, Electric does not use masking or output a full distribution…

ELECTRA pretrains a discriminator to detect replaced tokens, where the replacements are sampled from a generator trained with masked language modeling. Despite the compelling performance, ELECTRA suffers from the following two issues.…

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…

Language model (LM) pre-training has resulted in impressive performance and sample efficiency on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, it remains unclear how to best use pre-trained LMs for generation tasks such as abstractive…

We present a new framework AMOS that pretrains text encoders with an Adversarial learning curriculum via a Mixture Of Signals from multiple auxiliary generators. Following ELECTRA-style pretraining, the main encoder is trained as a…

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…

Transformer has been widely used thanks to its ability to capture sequence information in an efficient way. However, recent developments, such as BERT and GPT-2, deliver only heavy architectures with a focus on effectiveness. In this paper,…

Pre-training has marked numerous state of the arts in high-level computer vision, while few attempts have ever been made to investigate how pre-training acts in image processing systems. In this paper, we tailor transformer-based…

Pre-trained encoder-only and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models each have advantages, however training both model types from scratch is computationally expensive. We explore recipes to improve pre-training efficiency by initializing one…