Browsing by Author "Roberts, Adam"

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    Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
    (arXiv, 2019-10-19) Raffel, Colin; Shazeer, Noam; Roberts, Adam; Lee, Katherine; Narang, Sharan; Matena, Michae; Zhou, Yanqi; Li, Wei; Liu, Peter J.
    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.
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    mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer
    (arXiv, 2020-10-22) Xue, Linting; Constant, Noah; Roberts, Adam; Kale, Mihir; Al‑Rfou, Rami; Siddhant, Aditya; Barua, Aditya; Raffel, Colin
    The recent "Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer" (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We detail the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. We also describe a simple technique to prevent "accidental translation" in the zero-shot setting, where a generative model chooses to (partially) translate its prediction into the wrong language. All of the code and model checkpoints used in this work are publicly available.