Papers › BERTGEN: Multi-task Generation through BERT

BERTGEN: Multi-task Generation through BERT

7 Jun 2021ACL 2021 5arXiv:2106.03484archive 2025-07-28

Faidon Mitzalis, Ozan Caglayan, Pranava Madhyastha, Lucia Specia

We present BERTGEN, a novel generative, decoder-only model which extends BERT by fusing multimodal and multilingual pretrained models VL-BERT and M-BERT, respectively. BERTGEN is auto-regressively trained for language generation tasks, namely image captioning, machine translation and multimodal machine translation, under a multitask setting. With a comprehensive set of evaluations, we show that BERTGEN outperforms many strong baselines across the tasks explored. We also show BERTGEN's ability for zero-shot language generation, where it exhibits competitive performance to supervised counterparts. Finally, we conduct ablation studies which demonstrate that BERTGEN substantially benefits from multi-tasking and effectively transfers relevant inductive biases from the pre-trained models.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ImperialNLP/BertGen officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

DecoderImage CaptioningMachine TranslationMultimodal Machine TranslationText GenerationTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxVL-BERTWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections