| Challenge: | a dominant practice is to fine tune large pretrained transformer models using smaller downstream datasets . performance gains are not always attributable to the use of external data in massive amounts . |
| Approach: | They propose to use the same (downstream) training data for pretraining and finetuning to compare models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard pretraining on the BookWiki corpus on 7 and 5 datasets. |
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How much pretraining data do language models need to learn syntax? (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretraining methods are convenient, but expensive in terms of time and resources. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of pretraining data size on the syntactic capabilities of RoBERTa by using syntaktic structural probes to determine whether models pretrained on more data encode a higher amount of syntastic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better on part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and paraphrase identification. |
Does Pretraining for Summarization Require Knowledge Transfer? (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing theories claim that pretraining models learn linguistic knowledge from the pretraining corpus, but scientific explanations for these benefits remain unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose to use random character n-grams to test models on real corpora to see if the small residual benefit of using real data could be accounted for by the structure of the pretraining task. |
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How Much Pretraining Does Structured Data Need? (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly adopted for handling structured data, despite pretraining on unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose to re-initialize subsets of layers with random weights before fine-tuning on structured datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are compared to unstructured datasets and show that they perform well over structured data. |
To Pretrain or Not to Pretrain: Examining the Benefits of Pretrainng on Resource Rich Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives have shown that the number of training samples used in the downstream task is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MLM objectives to pretrain NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives to improve accuracy on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reach a diminishing return point as the supervised data size increases significantly. |
Data Contamination: From Memorization to Exploitation (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are typically trained on web-based datasets that are often "contaminated" with downstream test sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pretrain BERT models on Wikipedia and labeled downstream datasets and fine-tune them on the relevant task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compares models on Wikipedia and labeled downstream datasets on two models and three downstream tasks. |
Cost-effective Selection of Pretraining Data: A Case Study of Pretraining BERT on Social Media (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that domain-specific BERT models can be improved when in-domain data is used for pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Twitter and forum text as pretraining sources for two BERT models and use similarity measures to nominate in-domain data for pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to improve performance on downstream tasks by using in-domain data. |
Infusing Finetuning with Semantic Dependencies (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Several diagnostics help to localize the benefits of our approach. |
| Approach: | They apply convolutional graph encoders to integrate semantic parses into task-specific finetuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields benefits to natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmark. |
Go Simple and Pre-Train on Domain-Specific Corpora: On the Role of Training Data for Text Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models provide the foundations for state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, including text classification. |
| Approach: | They compare the performance of a linear classifier based on word embeddings with a pre-trained language model, i.e., BERT, across a wide range of datasets and classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in standard datasets with large training sets, but in settings with small training datasets it performs better. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jupinder Parmar, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Joseph Jennings, Bo Liu, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Zhilin Wang, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | Recent language models have impressive capabilities on a number of evaluation areas. |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic analysis of pretraining set construction to identify which methods yield the greatest gains in model accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to refine and improve a pretraining set. |