Related papers: Structure-Aware Masking for Protein Representation…

The current era of natural language processing (NLP) has been defined by the prominence of pre-trained language models since the advent of BERT. A feature of BERT and models with similar architecture is the objective of masked language…

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…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective, where a model needs to predict an original token that is replaced with a mask given contexts. Although simpler and computationally efficient pretraining…

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models…

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTM) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key…

Multilingual pre-trained language models, such as mBERT and XLM-R, have shown impressive cross-lingual ability. Surprisingly, both of them use multilingual masked language model (MLM) without any cross-lingual supervision or aligned data.…

Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations, but incurs substantial training costs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-based curriculum masking (CCM) method to…

Protein language models are trained primarily with masked language modeling (MLM), which predicts amino-acid identities at masked positions. We ask whether latent-space prediction can complement these token-level objectives under matched…

Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a helpful pretraining objective for powerful language models such as PaLM2. After training, such masked language models (MLMs) can provide distributions of tokens in the…

The prediction of protein structures from sequences is an important task for function prediction, drug design, and related biological processes understanding. Recent advances have proved the power of language models (LMs) in processing the…

Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. They however scale with man-hours and high-quality data. Masked Language Models (MLMs), such as BERT, scale with computing power as well as unstructured raw text data.…

Protein sequences are abundant in repeating segments, both as exact copies and as approximate segments with mutations. These repeats are important for protein structure and function, motivating decades of algorithmic work on repeat…

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…

Vision-and-Language Pre-training (VLP) improves model performance for downstream tasks that require image and text inputs. Current VLP approaches differ on (i) model architecture (especially image embedders), (ii) loss functions, and (iii)…

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series…

Conditional masked language model (CMLM) training has proven successful for non-autoregressive and semi-autoregressive sequence generation tasks, such as machine translation. Given a trained CMLM, however, it is not clear what the best…

Protein language models (PLMs) face a fundamental divide: masked language models (MLMs) excel at fitness prediction while causal models enable generation, forcing practitioners to maintain separate architectures. We introduce…

We study how masking and predicting tokens in an unsupervised fashion can give rise to linguistic structures and downstream performance gains. Recent theories have suggested that pretrained language models acquire useful inductive biases…

We describe our strategy for the 2025 edition of the BabyLM Challenge. Our main contribution is that of an improved form of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), which adapts the probabilities of the tokens masked according to the model's ability…

We explore optimally training protein language models, an area of significant interest in biological research where guidance on best practices is limited. Most models are trained with extensive compute resources until performance gains…