Related papers: Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Model vi…

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTM) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key…

The state of the arts in vision-language pretraining (VLP) achieves exemplary performance but suffers from high training costs resulting from slow convergence and long training time, especially on large-scale web datasets. An essential…

Vision-and-Language Pre-training (VLP) improves model performance for downstream tasks that require image and text inputs. Current VLP approaches differ on (i) model architecture (especially image embedders), (ii) loss functions, and (iii)…

Masked language models (MLMs) conventionally mask 15% of tokens due to the belief that more masking would leave insufficient context to learn good representations; this masking rate has been widely used, regardless of model sizes or masking…

We propose Curriculum by Masking (CBM), a novel state-of-the-art curriculum learning strategy that effectively creates an easy-to-hard training schedule via patch (token) masking, offering significant accuracy improvements over the…

Pre-training has proven to be effective in unsupervised machine translation due to its ability to model deep context information in cross-lingual scenarios. However, the cross-lingual information obtained from shared BPE spaces is…

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…

Despite the success of pretrained masked language models (MLM), why MLM pretraining is useful is still a qeustion not fully answered. In this work we theoretically and empirically show that MLM pretraining makes models robust to…

Rapid advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have revolutionized many fields, including healthcare. However, these advances raise significant privacy concerns, especially when pre-trained models fine-tuned and specialized on…

Current NLP models are predominantly trained through a two-stage "pre-train then fine-tune" pipeline. Prior work has shown that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage, using heuristic masking policies for masked language modeling…

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…

Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for various NLP tasks. Pre-training is usually independent of the downstream task, and previous works have shown that this…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been one of the most prominent approaches for pretraining bidirectional text encoders due to its simplicity and effectiveness. One notable concern about MLM is that the special $\texttt{[MASK]}$ symbol…

Masking strategies commonly employed in natural language processing are still underexplored in vision tasks such as concept learning, where conventional methods typically rely on full images. However, using masked images diversifies…

We propose a novel task-agnostic in-domain pre-training method that sits between generic pre-training and fine-tuning. Our approach selectively masks in-domain keywords, i.e., words that provide a compact representation of the target…

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…

Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. They however scale with man-hours and high-quality data. Masked Language Models (MLMs), such as BERT, scale with computing power as well as unstructured raw text data.…

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…

Neural language models are black-boxes--both linguistic patterns and factual knowledge are distributed across billions of opaque parameters. This entangled encoding makes it difficult to reliably inspect, verify, or update specific facts.…

The remarkable success of pretrained language models has motivated the study of what kinds of knowledge these models learn during pretraining. Reformulating tasks as fill-in-the-blanks problems (e.g., cloze tests) is a natural approach for…