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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…
The state of the art on many NLP tasks is currently achieved by large pre-trained language models, which require a considerable amount of computation. We explore a setting where many different predictions are made on a single piece of text.…
We introduce a principled probabilistic framework for reward-guided decoding in large language models, addressing the limitations of standard decoding methods that optimize token-level likelihood rather than sequence-level quality. Our…
For protein sequence datasets, unlabeled data has greatly outpaced labeled data due to the high cost of wet-lab characterization. Recent deep-learning approaches to protein prediction have shown that pre-training on unlabeled data can yield…
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…
Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (xMRC) is challenging due to the lack of training data in low-resource languages. The recent approaches use training data only in a resource-rich language like English to fine-tune large-scale…
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly integrate multiple vision encoders to improve performance on various benchmarks, assuming that diverse pretraining objectives yield complementary visual signals. However, we show…
In recent times, sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have gained a lot of popularity and provide state-of-the-art performance in a wide variety of tasks such as machine translation, headline generation, text summarization, speech to text…
While decoder-only large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results, encoder-decoder models are still widely adopted in real-world applications for their inference efficiency and richer encoder representation. In this paper, we…
Pre-trained Transformer language models (LM) have become go-to text representation encoders. Prior research fine-tunes deep LMs to encode text sequences such as sentences and passages into single dense vector representations for efficient…
End-to-end speech translation poses a heavy burden on the encoder, because it has to transcribe, understand, and learn cross-lingual semantics simultaneously. To obtain a powerful encoder, traditional methods pre-train it on ASR data to…
While pretrained encoders have achieved success in various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, there is a gap between these pretrained encoders and natural language generation (NLG). NLG tasks are often based on the encoder-decoder…
Recently, pre-trained language models mostly follow the pre-train-then-fine-tuning paradigm and have achieved great performance on various downstream tasks. However, since the pre-training stage is typically task-agnostic and the…
Training large language models is a computationally intensive process that often requires substantial resources to achieve state-of-the-art results. Incremental layer-wise training has been proposed as a potential strategy to optimize the…
Despite having impressive vision-language (VL) pretraining with BERT-based encoder for VL understanding, the pretraining of a universal encoder-decoder for both VL understanding and generation remains challenging. The difficulty originates…
Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…
In this paper, we study trade-offs between efficiency, cost and accuracy when pre-training Transformer encoders with different pre-training objectives. For this purpose, we analyze features of common objectives and combine them to create…
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…
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…
This work focuses on building language models (LMs) for code-switched text. We propose two techniques that significantly improve these LMs: 1) A novel recurrent neural network unit with dual components that focus on each language in the…