{"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/can-generative-pre-trained-language-models","title":"Can Generative Pre-trained Language Models Serve as Knowledge Bases for Closed-book QA?","arxiv_id":"2106.01561","date":"2021-06-03","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Cunxiang Wang","Pai Liu","Yue Zhang"],"abstract":"Recent work has investigated the interesting question using pre-trained language models (PLMs) as knowledge bases for answering open questions. However, existing work is limited in using small benchmarks with high test-train overlaps. We construct a new dataset of closed-book QA using SQuAD, and investigate the performance of BART. Experiments show that it is challenging for BART to remember training facts in high precision, and also challenging to answer closed-book questions even if relevant knowledge is retained. Some promising directions are found, including decoupling the knowledge memorizing process and the QA finetune process, forcing the model to recall relevant knowledge when question answering.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01561v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.01561v1.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":"can-generative-pre-trained-language-models","repo_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bart","method_name":"BART"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"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":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.01561","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.01561"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"unverified":7},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":7,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"d34c8ab039bdf946","entry":"encode","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d34c8ab039bdf946"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1369dca3f5bbc52a","entry":"encode_sliding_window","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1369dca3f5bbc52a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"bdda4461007294e1","entry":"load_s2t_t2s","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"bdda4461007294e1"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"48b450241c34c25e","entry":"load_triplets","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"48b450241c34c25e"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"e4a3df6f2b78aa86","entry":"mask_tokens","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/simpletransformers/language_modeling/language_modeling_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e4a3df6f2b78aa86"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1905d50393a33c6e","entry":"read_data_source_target","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"data_reader/data_reader.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/data_reader/data_reader.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1905d50393a33c6e"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"352a0a2908125997","entry":"tokenize","repo":"wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA","repo_kind":"official","path":"evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","file_url":"https://github.com/wangcunxiang/Can-PLM-Serve-as-KB-for-CBQA/blob/HEAD/evals/rank_cor-ques_in_train.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"352a0a2908125997"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}