Related papers: How does the task complexity of masked pretraining…

Recent work has shown the importance of adaptation of broad-coverage contextualised embedding models on the domain of the target task of interest. Current self-supervised adaptation methods are simplistic, as the training signal comes from…

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,…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) display impressive performances and have captured the attention of the NLP community. Establishing best practices in pretraining has, therefore, become a major focus of NLP research, especially since…

Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) refers to a model expanded from a Large Language Model (LLM) that possesses the capability to handle and infer multi-modal data. Current MLLMs typically begin by using LLMs to decompose tasks into…

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…

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…

Pre-training language models (LMs) on large-scale unlabeled text data makes the model much easier to achieve exceptional downstream performance than their counterparts directly trained on the downstream tasks. In this work, we study what…

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of…

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…

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)…

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…

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…

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…

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…

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…

We study how masking and predicting tokens in an unsupervised fashion can give rise to linguistic structures and downstream performance gains. Recent theories have suggested that pretrained language models acquire useful inductive biases…

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many self-supervised representation learning tasks. MLMs are trained by randomly masking portions of the input sequences with [MASK] tokens and learning to reconstruct the…

Recently, prompt tuning \cite{lester2021power} has gradually become a new paradigm for NLP, which only depends on the representation of the words by freezing the parameters of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to obtain remarkable…

In this paper, we study how the intrinsic nature of pre-training data contributes to the fine-tuned downstream performance. To this end, we pre-train different transformer-based masked language models on several corpora with certain…

The reusability of state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is often limited by their generalization problem, where their performance drastically decreases when evaluated on examples that differ from the training dataset, known…