

Overview
The XLNet model was proposed in XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding by Zhilin Yang, Zihang Dai, Yiming Yang, Jaime Carbonell, Ruslan Salakhutdinov,
Quoc V. Le. XLnet is an extension of the Transformer-XL model pre-trained using an autoregressive method to learn
bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the input sequence factorization
order.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves
better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on
corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a
pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive
pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all
permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive
formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into
pretraining. Empirically, under comparable experiment settings, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large
margin, including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
This model was contributed by thomwolf. The original code can be found here.
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