BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
11 Oct 2018-pp 4171-4186
TL;DR: BERT as mentioned in this paper pre-trains deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers, which can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks.
Abstract: We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models (Peters et al., 2018a; Radford et al., 2018), BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE score to 80.5 (7.7 point absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7% (4.6% absolute improvement), SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5 point absolute improvement) and SQuAD v2.0 Test F1 to 83.1 (5.1 point absolute improvement).
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TL;DR: It is found that BERT was significantly undertrained, and can match or exceed the performance of every model published after it, and the best model achieves state-of-the-art results on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD.
Abstract: Language model pretraining has led to significant performance gains but careful comparison between different approaches is challenging. Training is computationally expensive, often done on private datasets of different sizes, and, as we will show, hyperparameter choices have significant impact on the final results. We present a replication study of BERT pretraining (Devlin et al., 2019) that carefully measures the impact of many key hyperparameters and training data size. We find that BERT was significantly undertrained, and can match or exceed the performance of every model published after it. Our best model achieves state-of-the-art results on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD. These results highlight the importance of previously overlooked design choices, and raise questions about the source of recently reported improvements. We release our models and code.
13,994 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: Vision Transformer (ViT) attains excellent results compared to state-of-the-art convolutional networks while requiring substantially fewer computational resources to train.
Abstract: While the Transformer architecture has become the de-facto standard for natural language processing tasks, its applications to computer vision remain limited. In vision, attention is either applied in conjunction with convolutional networks, or used to replace certain components of convolutional networks while keeping their overall structure in place. We show that this reliance on CNNs is not necessary and a pure transformer applied directly to sequences of image patches can perform very well on image classification tasks. When pre-trained on large amounts of data and transferred to multiple mid-sized or small image recognition benchmarks (ImageNet, CIFAR-100, VTAB, etc.), Vision Transformer (ViT) attains excellent results compared to state-of-the-art convolutional networks while requiring substantially fewer computational resources to train.
12,690 citations
TL;DR: For example, AlphaFold as mentioned in this paper predicts protein structures with an accuracy competitive with experimental structures in the majority of cases using a novel deep learning architecture. But the accuracy is limited by the fact that no homologous structure is available.
Abstract: Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort1–4, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined5, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences6,7. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’8—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years9. Despite recent progress10–14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known. We validated an entirely redesigned version of our neural network-based model, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14)15, demonstrating accuracy competitive with experimental structures in a majority of cases and greatly outperforming other methods. Underpinning the latest version of AlphaFold is a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence alignments, into the design of the deep learning algorithm. AlphaFold predicts protein structures with an accuracy competitive with experimental structures in the majority of cases using a novel deep learning architecture.
10,601 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: This systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled datasets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks and achieves state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more.
Abstract: Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus'', we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.
6,953 citations
01 Jul 2020
TL;DR: BART is presented, a denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models, which matches the performance of RoBERTa on GLUE and SQuAD, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a range of abstractive dialogue, question answering, and summarization tasks.
Abstract: We present BART, a denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models. BART is trained by (1) corrupting text with an arbitrary noising function, and (2) learning a model to reconstruct the original text. It uses a standard Tranformer-based neural machine translation architecture which, despite its simplicity, can be seen as generalizing BERT (due to the bidirectional encoder), GPT (with the left-to-right decoder), and other recent pretraining schemes. We evaluate a number of noising approaches, finding the best performance by both randomly shuffling the order of sentences and using a novel in-filling scheme, where spans of text are replaced with a single mask token. BART is particularly effective when fine tuned for text generation but also works well for comprehension tasks. It matches the performance of RoBERTa on GLUE and SQuAD, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a range of abstractive dialogue, question answering, and summarization tasks, with gains of up to 3.5 ROUGE. BART also provides a 1.1 BLEU increase over a back-translation system for machine translation, with only target language pretraining. We also replicate other pretraining schemes within the BART framework, to understand their effect on end-task performance.
4,505 citations
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1,802 citations