Related papers: A Theoretical Analysis of Why Masked Diffusion Mod…

As a successful approach to self-supervised learning, contrastive learning aims to learn invariant information shared among distortions of the input sample. While contrastive learning has yielded continuous advancements in sampling strategy…

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Part of the success of diffusion models stems from their ability to perform iterative refinement, i.e., repeatedly correcting outputs during generation. However, modern masked discrete diffusion lacks this capability: when a token is…

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) based on a reconstruction task have risen to be a promising paradigm for self-supervised learning (SSL) and achieve state-of-the-art performance across different benchmark datasets. However, despite its impressive…

Multimodal pre-training remains constrained by the descriptive bias of image-caption pairs, leading models to favor surface linguistic cues over grounded visual understanding. We introduce MMRPT, a masked multimodal reinforcement…

This paper shows how diffusion language models (DLMs) can be used as effective and efficient retrievers. Existing DLM-based retrievers (e.g., DiffEmbed) follow BERT-style encoding, representing each query or passage as a single mean-pooled…

We introduce Masked Trajectory Models (MTM) as a generic abstraction for sequential decision making. MTM takes a trajectory, such as a state-action sequence, and aims to reconstruct the trajectory conditioned on random subsets of the same…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is the standard objective for training protein language models, typically implemented by randomly masking individual residues at a fixed rate (e.g., 15%). This practice implicitly assumes that all sequence…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

As the deep learning revolution marches on, masked modeling has emerged as a distinctive approach that involves predicting parts of the original data that are proportionally masked during training, and has demonstrated exceptional…

With the widespread use of machine learning, concerns over its security and reliability have become prevalent. As such, many have developed defenses to harden neural networks against adversarial examples, imperceptibly perturbed inputs that…

Autoregressive language models are the currently dominant paradigm for text generation, but they have some fundamental limitations that cannot be remedied by scale-for example inherently sequential and unidirectional generation. While…

Masking tokens uniformly at random constitutes a common flaw in the pretraining of Masked Language Models (MLMs) such as BERT. We show that such uniform masking allows an MLM to minimize its training objective by latching onto shallow local…

Since the introduction of Masked Autoencoders, various improvements to masking techniques have been explored. In this paper, we rethink masking strategies for audio representation learning using masked prediction-based self-supervised…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is widely used to pretrain language models. The standard random masking strategy in MLM causes the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to be biased toward high-frequency tokens. Representation learning of rare…

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…

Historically, LLMs have been trained using either autoregressive (AR) or masked language modeling (MLM) objectives, with AR models gaining dominance in recent years. However, AR models are inherently incapable of masked infilling, which is…

Dense retrieval (DR) has shown promising results in information retrieval. In essence, DR requires high-quality text representations to support effective search in the representation space. Recent studies have shown that pre-trained…