Challenge: Existing pre-trained MLMs produce an anisotropic distribution of token representations . this is not ideal for tasks that require discriminative semantic meanings of distinct tokens - a problem that exists in pre-training models .
Approach: They propose a continual pre-training approach that encourages BERT to learn an isotropic distribution of token representations.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on a wide range of English and Chinese benchmarks.

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Challenge: Random masking does not consider the importance of the different words in the sentence meaning, e.g., entity-level masking requires expensive prior knowledge and generally does not use existing model weights.
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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.
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A Sentence is Worth 128 Pseudo Tokens: A Semantic-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Sentence Embeddings (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to contrastive learning are heavily affected by superficial features like sentence length and syntax.
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Contextual Representation Learning beyond Masked Language Modeling (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: masked language models adopt sampled embeddings as anchors to estimate and inject contextual semantics to representations.
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Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training.
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Don’t Judge a Language Model by Its Last Layer: Contrastive Learning with Layer-Wise Attention Pooling (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Recent pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown competitive performance on many natural language processing tasks.
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AMBERT: A Pre-trained Language Model with Multi-Grained Tokenization (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown great power in natural language understanding . fine-grained tokenizations have advantages and disadvantages for learning of pre-tried models .
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TR-BERT: Dynamic Token Reduction for Accelerating BERT Inference (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive in inference, making them impractical in resource-limited real-world applications.
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Encoder-Decoder Models Can Benefit from Pre-trained Masked Language Models in Grammatical Error Correction (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for incorporating a masked language model into an EncDec model have potential drawbacks when applied to GEC.
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Revisiting Token Dropping Strategy in Efficient BERT Pretraining (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Token dropping is a recently-proposed strategy to speed up the pretraining of masked language models, such as BERT.
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