| Challenge: | Masked language models do not define an explicit distribution over language, but they assume that tokens masked out are conditionally independent given the unmasked tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a set of MLM's unary conditionals to construct a fully-connected Markov random field over the input to deduce an explicit joint distribution from MLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing Markov random field-based approaches and outperformed the original model's conditionals. |
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MLMLM: Link Prediction with Mean Likelihood Masked Language Model (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. however, they scale with man-hours and high-quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose to commit the knowledge embedded in MLMs to a KB, making it interpretable . they propose to use a mean likelihood Masked Language Model to compare the likelihood of generating different entities to perform link prediction in a tractable manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach compares the likelihood of generating different entities to perform link prediction in a tractable manner. |
Quantifying Privacy Risks of Masked Language Models Using Membership Inference Attacks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior attempts at measuring leakage of MLMs via membership inference attacks have been inconclusive, implying potential robustness of Mlms to privacy attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a stronger membership inference attack based on likelihood ratio hypothesis testing that involves an additional MLM to more accurately quantify the privacy risks of memorization in MLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack improves the AUC of prior membership inference attacks from 0.66 to an alarmingly high 0.90 level on models trained on medical notes. |
Masked Language Model Scoring (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained masked language models require finetuning for most tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate pretrained masked language models out of the box via their pseudo-log-likelihood scores (PLLs) they attribute this success to PLL’s unsupervised expression of linguistic acceptability without a left-to-right bias, greatly improving on scores from GPT-2 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms autoregressive language models in a variety of tasks. |
Emerging Cross-lingual Structure in Pretrained Language Models (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that multilingual pretraining works, but is unable to measure these effects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual masked language modeling to train a model on concatenated text from multiple languages to find universal latent symmetries in embedding spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be trained on concatenated text from multiple languages without shared vocabulary or domain similarity. |
Data Efficient Masked Language Modeling for Vision and Language (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling (MLM) is one of the key sub-tasks in vision-language pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a masking strategy that masks tokens with a 15% probability for text-only data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed masking strategy outperforms the baseline model on a prompt-based probing task designed to elicit image objects. |
On the Inductive Bias of Masked Language Modeling: From Statistical to Syntactic Dependencies (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that pretrained language models acquire useful inductive biases through masks that implicitly act as cloze reductions for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct cloze-like masks using task-specific lexicons to explain their results . they show that the majority of performance gains come from generic masks that are not associated with the lexical . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a classic method for unsupervised parsing. |
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. |
Inference Strategies for Machine Translation with Conditional Masking (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conditional masked language model training has proven successful for non-autoregressive and semi-auto-regressively sequence generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional masked language model (CMLM) that is a factorization of conditional probabilities of partial sequences and propose heuristics to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is more efficient than the standard “mask-predict” algorithm on machine translation tasks. |
Improving Pretraining Techniques for Code-Switched NLP (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual pretraining models for code-switched inputs are a key component of NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use masked language modeling techniques to mask code-switched text that are cognizant of language boundaries prior to masking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques improve performance on two downstream tasks, Question Answering (QA) and Sentiment Analysis (SA), compared to standard pretraining techniques. |
Mask-Predict: Parallel Decoding of Conditional Masked Language Models (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a masked language model is used to train a model to predict subsets of mangled words . a parallel decoding algorithm can be used to generate translations in a constant number of iterations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model and a parallel decoding algorithm which train a machine to predict any subset of target words . they introduce conditional masked language models (CMLMs) which are trained with a mangled language model objective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art performance levels for non-autoregressive and parallel decoding models by over 4 BLEU on average. |