{"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/learning-better-masking-for-better-language","title":"Learning Better Masking for Better Language Model Pre-training","arxiv_id":"2208.10806","date":"2022-08-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dongjie Yang","Zhuosheng Zhang","Hai Zhao"],"abstract":"Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been widely used as the denoising objective in pre-training language models (PrLMs). Existing PrLMs commonly adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy where a fixed masking ratio is applied and different contents are masked by an equal probability throughout the entire training. However, the model may receive complicated impact from pre-training status, which changes accordingly as training time goes on. In this paper, we show that such time-invariant MLM settings on masking ratio and masked content are unlikely to deliver an optimal outcome, which motivates us to explore the influence of time-variant MLM settings. We propose two scheduled masking approaches that adaptively tune the masking ratio and masked content in different training stages, which improves the pre-training efficiency and effectiveness verified on the downstream tasks. Our work is a pioneer study on time-variant masking strategy on ratio and content and gives a better understanding of how masking ratio and masked content influence the MLM pre-training.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10806v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.10806v3.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":"learning-better-masking-for-better-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/mutonix/better_masking","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"denoising","task_name":"Denoising"},{"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"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2208.10806","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}