{"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/informask-unsupervised-informative-masking","title":"InforMask: Unsupervised Informative Masking for Language Model Pretraining","arxiv_id":"2210.11771","date":"2022-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nafis Sadeq","Canwen Xu","Julian McAuley"],"abstract":"Masked language modeling is widely used for pretraining large language models for natural language understanding (NLU). However, random masking is suboptimal, allocating an equal masking rate for all tokens. In this paper, we propose InforMask, a new unsupervised masking strategy for training masked language models. InforMask exploits Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) to select the most informative tokens to mask. We further propose two optimizations for InforMask to improve its efficiency. With a one-off preprocessing step, InforMask outperforms random masking and previously proposed masking strategies on the factual recall benchmark LAMA and the question answering benchmark SQuAD v1 and v2.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11771v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.11771v1.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":"informask-unsupervised-informative-masking","repo_url":"https://github.com/nafissadeq/informask","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"masked-language-modeling","task_name":"Masked Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"lama","method_name":"LAMA"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"tanh-activation","method_name":"Tanh Activation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.11771","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2210.11771"}},"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/nafissadeq/informask","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/NafisSadeq/InforMask","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"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":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"10a9cbaf46838744","entry":"Dataset","repo":"NafisSadeq/InforMask","repo_kind":"official","path":"pretrain/dataset.py","file_url":"https://github.com/NafisSadeq/InforMask/blob/HEAD/pretrain/dataset.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"10a9cbaf46838744"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}