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Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach,…

Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…

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…

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…

Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages. However, concrete evidence for the effects of multilinguality on language modeling performance in individual languages remains scarce. Here, we…

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…

Scaling laws predict the loss of a target machine learning model by extrapolating from easier-to-train models with fewer parameters or smaller training sets. This provides an efficient way for practitioners and researchers alike to compare…

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and…

Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate small molecule drug design due to their ability to reason about information from diverse sources and formats. However, their practical utility remains unclear due to the lack of…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through ever-increasing parameter counts, but scaling incurs steep computational costs. To better understand LLM scaling, we study representational differences between LLMs and…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…

Large language models (LLMs) show best-in-class performance across a wide range of natural language processing applications. Training these models is an extremely computationally expensive task; frontier Artificial Intelligence (AI)…

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…

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face significant challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to limited data. While current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still struggle with LRLs, smaller multilingual models (mLMs)…

Low precision training and inference affect both the quality and cost of language models, but current scaling laws do not account for this. In this work, we devise "precision-aware" scaling laws for both training and inference. We propose…

Reusing pretrained base models for further pretraining, such as continual pretraining or model growth, is promising at reducing the cost of training language models from scratch. However, the effectiveness remains unclear, especially when…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has proven to be an essential component of Vision-Language (VL) pretraining. To implement MLM, the researcher must make two design choices: the masking strategy, which determines which tokens to mask, and the…

Diffusion language models are a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for faster generation. Among discrete diffusion approaches, Masked diffusion currently dominates, largely driven by strong perplexity on…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) pre-training is one of the primary ways to initialize Neural Information Retrieval (IR) models prior to retrieval fine-tuning. However, studies show that MLM pre-trained models have limited readiness and…