Papers › BAM! Born-Again Multi-Task Networks for Natural Language Understanding

BAM! Born-Again Multi-Task Networks for Natural Language Understanding

10 Jul 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1907.04829archive 2025-07-28

Kevin Clark, Minh-Thang Luong, Urvashi Khandelwal, Christopher D. Manning, Quoc V. Le

It can be challenging to train multi-task neural networks that outperform or even match their single-task counterparts. To help address this, we propose using knowledge distillation where single-task models teach a multi-task model. We enhance this training with teacher annealing, a novel method that gradually transitions the model from distillation to supervised learning, helping the multi-task model surpass its single-task teachers. We evaluate our approach by multi-task fine-tuning BERT on the GLUE benchmark. Our method consistently improves over standard single-task and multi-task training.

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Knowledge DistillationNatural Language Understanding

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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