@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-pre,
    title = "Pre-training Language Model as a Multi-perspective Course Learner",
    author = "Chen, Beiduo  and
      Huang, Shaohan  and
      Zhang, Zihan  and
      Guo, Wu  and
      Ling, Zhenhua  and
      Huang, Haizhen  and
      Wei, Furu  and
      Deng, Weiwei  and
      Zhang, Qi",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.9",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.9",
    pages = "114--128",
    abstract = "ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous training and deficient interaction. Generator with only masked language modeling (MLM) leads to biased learning and label imbalance for discriminator, decreasing learning efficiency; no explicit feedback loop from discriminator to generator results in the chasm between these two components, underutilizing the course learning. In this study, a multi-perspective course learning (MCL) method is proposed to fetch a many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training, and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. Concretely, three self-supervision courses are designed to alleviate inherent flaws of MLM and balance the label in a multi-perspective way. Besides, two self-correction courses are proposed to bridge the chasm between the two encoders by creating a {``}correction notebook{''} for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the {``}tug-of-war{''} dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA{'}s average performance by 2.8{\%} and 3.2{\%} absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks, and overshadows recent advanced ELECTRA-style models under the same settings. The pre-trained MCL model is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/McmanusChen/MCL-base}.",
}

ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous training and deficient interaction. Generator with only masked language modeling (MLM) leads to biased learning and label imbalance for discriminator, decreasing learning efficiency; no explicit feedback loop from discriminator to generator results in the chasm between these two components, underutilizing the course learning. In this study, a multi-perspective course learning (MCL) method is proposed to fetch a many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training, and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. Concretely, three self-supervision courses are designed to alleviate inherent flaws of MLM and balance the label in a multi-perspective way. Besides, two self-correction courses are proposed to bridge the chasm between the two encoders by creating a {``}correction notebook{''} for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the {``}tug-of-war{''} dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA{'}s average performance by 2.8{\%} and 3.2{\%} absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks, and overshadows recent advanced ELECTRA-style models under the same settings. The pre-trained MCL model is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/McmanusChen/MCL-base}.
Chen, Beiduo Huang, Shaohan Zhang, Zihan Guo, Wu Ling, Zhenhua Huang, Haizhen Wei, Furu Deng, Weiwei Zhang, Qi
Pre-training Language Model as a Multi-perspective Course Learner