Self-Evolution Learning for Discriminative Language Model Pretraining
Qihuang Zhong Liang Ding Juhua Liu Bo Du Dacheng Tao
Masked language modeling, widely used in discriminative language model (e.g.,
BERT) pretraining, commonly adopts a random masking strategy. However, random
masking does not consider the importance of the different words in the sentence
meaning, where some of them are more worthy to be predicted. Therefore, various
masking strategies (e.g., entity-level masking) are proposed, but most of them
require expensive prior knowledge and generally train from scratch without
reusing existing model weights. In this paper, we present Self-Evolution
learning (SE), a simple and effective token masking and learning method to
fully and wisely exploit the knowledge from data. SE focuses on learning the
informative yet under-explored tokens and adaptively regularizes the training
by introducing a novel Token-specific Label Smoothing approach. Experiments on
10 tasks show that our SE brings consistent and significant improvements
(+1.43~2.12 average scores) upon different PLMs. In-depth analyses demonstrate
that SE improves linguistic knowledge learning and generalization.