Related papers: Inconsistencies in Masked Language Models

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…

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…

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…

Multilingual language models (MLMs) store factual knowledge across languages but often struggle to provide consistent responses to semantically equivalent prompts in different languages. While previous studies point out this cross-lingual…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

A possible explanation for the impressive performance of masked language model (MLM) pre-training is that such models have learned to represent the syntactic structures prevalent in classical NLP pipelines. In this paper, we propose a…

Conditional masked language model (CMLM) training has proven successful for non-autoregressive and semi-autoregressive sequence generation tasks, such as machine translation. Given a trained CMLM, however, it is not clear what the best…

Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models…

Can autoregressive large language models (LLMs) learn consistent probability distributions when trained on sequences in different token orders? We prove formally that for any well-defined probability distribution, sequence perplexity is…

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…

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…

Masked language models (MLM) do not explicitly define a distribution over language, i.e., they are not language models per se. However, recent work has implicitly treated them as such for the purposes of generation and scoring. This paper…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper…

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.…

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…

Consistency, which refers to the capability of generating the same predictions for semantically similar contexts, is a highly desirable property for a sound language understanding model. Although recent pretrained language models (PLMs)…

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to acquire sequence-level planning abilities during training, yet their planning behavior exhibited at inference time often appears short-sighted and inconsistent with these capabilities. We…

A major bottleneck of standard auto-regressive large language models is that their inference process is inherently sequential, resulting in very long and costly inference times. To circumvent this, practitioners proposed a class of language…

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…