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

While scaling laws for Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally focus on proxy metrics like pretraining loss, predicting downstream task performance has been considered unreliable. This paper challenges that view by proposing a direct…

Scene Text Recognition (STR) is difficult because of the variations in text styles, shapes, and backgrounds. Though the integration of linguistic information enhances models' performance, existing methods based on either permuted language…

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) are increasingly used to predict human behavior. We propose a measure for evaluating how much knowledge a pretrained LLM brings to such a prediction: its equivalent sample size, defined as the amount of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on machine translation for high resource language pairs and domains. However, in specialised domains (e.g. medical) LLMs have shown lower performance compared to standard neural…

While metrics available during pre-training, such as perplexity, correlate well with model performance at scaling-laws studies, their predictive capacities at a fixed model size remain unclear, hindering effective model selection and…

It is generally thought that transformer-based large language models benefit from pre-training by learning generic linguistic knowledge that can be focused on a specific task during fine-tuning. However, we propose that much of the benefit…

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

This paper investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to recognise and solve tasks which have been obfuscated beyond recognition. Focusing on competitive programming and benchmark tasks (LeetCode and MATH), we compare…

Speech foundation models, such as HuBERT and its variants, are pre-trained on large amounts of unlabeled speech data and then used for a range of downstream tasks. These models use a masked prediction objective, where the model learns to…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show impressive vision-language benchmark performance, yet growing concerns about data contamination (test set exposure during training) risk masking true generalization. This concern extends to…

Curriculum learning-organizing training data from easy to hard-has improved efficiency across machine learning domains, yet remains underexplored for language model pretraining. We present the first systematic investigation of curriculum…

The major paradigm of applying a pre-trained language model to downstream tasks is to fine-tune it on labeled task data, which often suffers instability and low performance when the labeled examples are scarce.~One way to alleviate this…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in a wide-range of language tasks without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, they remain prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies, and often struggle with…

When adapting an encoder to a new domain, the standard approach is to continue training with Masked Language Modeling (MLM). We show that temporarily switching to Causal Language Modeling (CLM) followed by a short MLM decay improves…

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task.…

The wide adoption and application of Masked language models~(MLMs) on sensitive data (from legal to medical) necessitates a thorough quantitative investigation into their privacy vulnerabilities -- to what extent do MLMs leak information…

Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this…

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational costs and inefficiency. Instruction-related visual token compression demonstrates strong task relevance, which…

We present Pre-trained Machine Reader (PMR), a novel method for retrofitting pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) to pre-trained machine reading comprehension (MRC) models without acquiring labeled data. PMR can resolve the discrepancy…