| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can't capture domain-specific and task-specific patterns because of the task-agnostic pre-training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-guided pre-training stage with selective masking between general pre-train and fine-tuning to learn domain-specific patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable or even better performance with less than 50% of computation cost. |
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Task-Informed Anti-Curriculum by Masking Improves Downstream Performance on Text (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling is widely adopted, but the process of selecting tokens for masking is random and the percentage of masked tokens is typically fixed for the entire training process. |
| Approach: | They propose to adjust the masking ratio based on a task-informed anti-curriculum learning scheme to mask useful and harmful tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the ability of the model to focus on key task-relevant features, contributing to statistically significant performance gains across tasks. |
Difference-Masking: Choosing What to Mask in Continued Pretraining (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Alex Wilf, Syeda Akter, Leena Mathur, Paul Liang, Sheryl Mathew, Mengrou Shou, Eric Nyberg, Louis-Philippe Morency
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to masked prediction have shown that deciding what to mask can substantially improve learning outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a masking strategy that automatically chooses what to mask during continued pretraining by considering what makes a task domain different from the pretraining domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed masking strategy outperforms baselines on language-only and multimodal video tasks. |
Masking as an Efficient Alternative to Finetuning for Pretrained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive evaluations of masking BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT on eleven diverse NLP tasks show that our binary masked language models encode information necessary for solving downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models where selective binary masks are learned instead of finetuning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive evaluations of masking BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT on eleven diverse NLP tasks show that the proposed method yields comparable performance to finetuning, but has a much smaller memory footprint when multiple tasks need to be solved. |
NB-MLM: Efficient Domain Adaptation of Masked Language Models for Sentiment Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-training Masked Language Models (MLMs) on massive datasets is expensive, but it is performed for each domain or task individually and is resource-demanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for more efficient adaptation that focuses on predicting words with large weights of the Naive Bayes classifier trained for the task at hand. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sentiment analysis by focusing on predicting words with large weights of the Naive Bayes classifier trained for the task at hand. |
Frustratingly Simple Pretraining Alternatives to Masked Language Modeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling (MLM) is widely used in natural language processing for self-supervised learning of text representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token-level classification tasks as main pretraining objectives instead of Masked language modeling (MLM) . Empirical results show that pretraining a model with 41% of the BERT-BASE’s parameters, BERT MEDIUM results in only a 1% drop in GLUE scores with their best objective. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed methods achieve comparable or better performance to MLM using a BERT-BASE architecture. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Model Sensitivity via Mask Specific losses: A case study on Biomedical NER (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Fine-tuning is the prevailing practice for adapting language models (LMs) to new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a mask specific language model that weights the importance of domain-specific terms during fine-tuning to avoid insensitivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms advanced masking strategies such as span- and PMI-based masking. |
Mask More and Mask Later: Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Models by Disentangling the [MASK] Token (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained MLMs can be used to generalize well to a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to append [MASK]s at a later layer to reduce sequence length for earlier layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms RoBERTa for 6 out of 8 GLUE tasks on average by 0.4%. |
How does the task complexity of masked pretraining objectives affect downstream performance? (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a mask-based objective to predict a token that is replaced with a masked token given its context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed objectives show that they should have half the complexity needed to perform comparably to MLM. |
Curriculum Masking in Vision-Language Pretraining to Maximize Cross Modal Interaction (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | masked language modeling is widely used as a pretraining component in Vision and language (V+L) but performance on benchmarks has not received the attention it deserves. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum masking scheme that uses a parallel mask selection agent to mask tokens at a frequency proportional to the level of cross modal interaction necessary to reconstruct them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves relational understanding on a wide range of V+L tasks. |
Masked Latent Semantic Modeling: an Efficient Pre-training Alternative to Masked Language Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study suggests that masked language models are a useful pre-training technique for natural language processing . a study using mlms pre-trained by a team of researchers has improved performance . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative to the classic masked language modeling paradigm . they use an unsupervised technique which uses sparse coding to make the prediction possible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves on pre-trained models compared to vanilla MLM . the proposed model returns distributions over their vocabulary peaking at plausible substitutes . |