Related papers: Pre-training vs. Fine-tuning: A Reproducibility St…
Middle training methods aim to bridge the gap between the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training and the final finetuning for retrieval. Recent models such as CoCondenser, RetroMAE, and LexMAE argue that the MLM task is not sufficient…
Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…
Current pre-trained language model approaches to information retrieval can be broadly divided into two categories: sparse retrievers (to which belong also non-neural approaches such as bag-of-words methods, e.g., BM25) and dense retrievers.…
Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained language models (e.g., multilingual BERT) to downstream cross-lingual tasks has shown promising results. However, the fine-tuning process inevitably changes the parameters of the pre-trained model and…
Retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) have received much attention recently. However, typically the retriever is not trained jointly as a native component of the LM, but added post-hoc to an already-pretrained LM, which limits the…
Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate a vast amount of factual information within their pre-trained weights, as evidenced by their ability to answer diverse questions across different domains. However, this knowledge is inherently…
To decipher the algorithm underlying the human brain's language representation, previous work probed brain responses to language input with pre-trained artificial neural network (ANN) models fine-tuned on NLU tasks. However, full…
Dense retrieval systems are commonly used for information retrieval (IR). They rely on learning text representations through an encoder and usually require supervised modeling via labelled data which can be costly to obtain or simply…
Despite pre-training's progress in many important NLP tasks, it remains to explore effective pre-training strategies for dense retrieval. In this paper, we propose RetroMAE, a new retrieval oriented pre-training paradigm based on Masked…
Deep neural networks can yield good performance on various tasks but often require large amounts of data to train them. Meta-learning received considerable attention as one approach to improve the generalization of these networks from a…
State-of-the-art performance on language understanding tasks is now achieved with increasingly large networks; the current record holder has billions of parameters. Given a language model pre-trained on massive unlabeled text corpora, only…
During the pretraining phase, large language models (LLMs) acquire vast amounts of knowledge from extensive text corpora. Nevertheless, in later stages such as fine-tuning and inference, the model may encounter knowledge not covered in the…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) aim to learn universal language representations by conducting self-supervised training tasks on large-scale corpora. Since PLMs capture word semantics in different contexts, the quality of word…
Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong effectiveness and robustness while fine-tuned as dense retrievers. However, their large parameter size brings significant inference time computational challenges, including high encoding…
There is growing evidence that pretrained language models improve task-specific fine-tuning not just for the languages seen in pretraining, but also for new languages and even non-linguistic data. What is the nature of this surprising…
Fine-tuning BERT-based models is resource-intensive in memory, computation, and time. While many prior works aim to improve inference efficiency via compression techniques, e.g., pruning, these works do not explicitly address the…
Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved great success in the natural language process field. The standard paradigm of exploiting them includes two steps: first, pre-training a model, e.g. BERT, with a large scale unlabeled monolingual…
We investigate improving the retrieval effectiveness of embedding models through the lens of corpus-specific fine-tuning. Prior work has shown that fine-tuning with queries generated using a dataset's retrieval corpus can boost retrieval…
Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they are shown to be lacking in knowledge when dealing with knowledge driven tasks. Despite the many…