Frustratingly Simple Pretraining Alternatives to Masked Language Modeling

This paper compares MLM objective with other five simple pre-training objectives under the setting of 5 days BERT pre-training. Their results show that predicting whether a token is random or shuffled yields comparable or better results than the MLM but runs much much faster.

Comments

  • Not sure how many steps did they train in 5 days. Maybe it’s just a matter of under-fitting?
  • Otherwise this result is quite inspiring as it saves lots of time.
Rating
  • 5: Transformative: This paper is likely to change our field. It should be considered for a best paper award.
  • 4.5: Exciting: It changed my thinking on this topic. I would fight for it to be accepted.
  • 4: Strong: I learned a lot from it. I would like to see it accepted.
  • 3.5: Leaning positive: It can be accepted more or less in its current form. However, the work it describes is not particularly exciting and/or inspiring, so it will not be a big loss if people don’t see it in this conference.
  • 3: Ambivalent: It has merits (e.g., it reports state-of-the-art results, the idea is nice), but there are key weaknesses (e.g., I didn’t learn much from it, evaluation is not convincing, it describes incremental work). I believe it can significantly benefit from another round of revision, but I won’t object to accepting it if my co-reviewers are willing to champion it.
  • 2.5: Leaning negative: I am leaning towards rejection, but I can be persuaded if my co-reviewers think otherwise.
  • 2: Mediocre: I would rather not see it in the conference.
  • 1.5: Weak: I am pretty confident that it should be rejected.
  • 1: Poor: I would fight to have it rejected.

0 投票人