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Related papers: Entropy-aware Masking for Masked Language Modeling

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While transformer-based models achieve strong performance on text classification, we explore whether masking input tokens can further enhance their effectiveness. We propose token masking regularization, a simple yet theoretically motivated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xianglong Xu , John Bowen , Rojin Taheri

Masked language modeling, widely used in discriminative language model (e.g., BERT) pretraining, commonly adopts a random masking strategy. However, random masking does not consider the importance of the different words in the sentence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Qihuang Zhong , Liang Ding , Juhua Liu , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

Language prediction is constrained by informational entropy intrinsic to language, such that there exists a limit to how accurate any language model can become and equivalently a lower bound to language compression. The most efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Benjamin L. Badger , Matthew Neligeorge

Through exploiting a high level of parallelism enabled by graphics processing units, transformer architectures have enabled tremendous strides forward in the field of natural language processing. In a traditional masked language model,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Muhammed Shahir Abdurrahman , Hashem Elezabi , Bruce Changlong Xu

In the current work, we connect token-level uncertainty in causal language modeling to two types of training objectives: 1) masked maximum likelihood (MLE), 2) self-distillation. We show that masked MLE is effective in reducing epistemic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Tingkai Liu , Ari S. Benjamin , Anthony M. Zador

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Baohao Liao , David Thulke , Sanjika Hewavitharana , Hermann Ney , Christof Monz

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Yuxian Gu , Zhengyan Zhang , Xiaozhi Wang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training methods such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. While they produce good results when transferred to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Kevin Clark , Minh-Thang Luong , Quoc V. Le , Christopher D. Manning

Discrete speech representation learning has recently attracted increasing interest in both acoustic and semantic modeling. Existing approaches typically encode 16 kHz waveforms into discrete tokens at a rate of 25 or 50 tokens per second.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jialong Zuo , Guangyan Zhang , Minghui Fang , Shengpeng Ji , Xiaoqi Jiao , Jingyu Li , Yiwen Guo , Zhou Zhao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Tianyi Zhang , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Recent work has shown the importance of adaptation of broad-coverage contextualised embedding models on the domain of the target task of interest. Current self-supervised adaptation methods are simplistic, as the training signal comes from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Thuy-Trang Vu , Dinh Phung , Gholamreza Haffari

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Atsuki Yamaguchi , George Chrysostomou , Katerina Margatina , Nikolaos Aletras

Token dropping is a recently-proposed strategy to speed up the pretraining of masked language models, such as BERT, by skipping the computation of a subset of the input tokens at several middle layers. It can effectively reduce the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Qihuang Zhong , Liang Ding , Juhua Liu , Xuebo Liu , Min Zhang , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zhenpeng Su , Xing Wu , Xue Bai , Zijia Lin , Hui Chen , Guiguang Ding , Wei Zhou , Songlin Hu

Masked language modeling (MLM) is one of the key sub-tasks in vision-language pretraining. In the cross-modal setting, tokens in the sentence are masked at random, and the model predicts the masked tokens given the image and the text. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Yonatan Bitton , Gabriel Stanovsky , Michael Elhadad , Roy Schwartz

Masked language modeling is widely used for pretraining large language models for natural language understanding (NLU). However, random masking is suboptimal, allocating an equal masking rate for all tokens. In this paper, we propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Nafis Sadeq , Canwen Xu , Julian McAuley

Representation learning for text via pretraining a language model on a large corpus has become a standard starting point for building NLP systems. This approach stands in contrast to autoencoders, also trained on raw text, but with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Ivan Montero , Nikolaos Pappas , Noah A. Smith

As access to high-quality, domain-specific data grows increasingly scarce, multi-epoch training has become a practical strategy for adapting large language models (LLMs). However, autoregressive models often suffer from performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Jiapeng Wang , Yiwen Hu , Yanzipeng Gao , Haoyu Wang , Shuo Wang , Hongyu Lu , Jiaxin Mao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junyi Li , Xiao Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Linhan Zhang , Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Chong Deng , Xin Cao , Kongzhang Hao , Yuxin Jiang , Wei Wang
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