{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/bertgen-multi-task-generation-through-bert","title":"BERTGEN: Multi-task Generation through BERT","arxiv_id":"2106.03484","date":"2021-06-07","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Faidon Mitzalis","Ozan Caglayan","Pranava Madhyastha","Lucia Specia"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03484v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.03484v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"bertgen-multi-task-generation-through-bert","repo_url":"https://github.com/ImperialNLP/BertGen","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"machine-translation","task_name":"Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"multimodal-machine-translation","task_name":"Multimodal Machine Translation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"vl-bert","method_name":"VL-BERT"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.03484","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}