Papers › Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding

Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding

31 Jan 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1901.11504archive 2025-07-28

Xiaodong Liu, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Jianfeng Gao

In this paper, we present a Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) for learning representations across multiple natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. MT-DNN not only leverages large amounts of cross-task data, but also benefits from a regularization effect that leads to more general representations in order to adapt to new tasks and domains. MT-DNN extends the model proposed in Liu et al. (2015) by incorporating a pre-trained bidirectional transformer language model, known as BERT (Devlin et al., 2018). MT-DNN obtains new state-of-the-art results on ten NLU tasks, including SNLI, SciTail, and eight out of nine GLUE tasks, pushing the GLUE benchmark to 82.7% (2.2% absolute improvement). We also demonstrate using the SNLI and SciTail datasets that the representations learned by MT-DNN allow domain adaptation with substantially fewer in-domain labels than the pre-trained BERT representations. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/namisan/mt-dnn.

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Tasks

Domain AdaptationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLinguistic AcceptabilityNatural Language InferenceNatural Language UnderstandingParaphrase IdentificationSentiment Analysis

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Linguistic Acceptability CoLA MT-DNN Accuracy 68.4% #18 of 43 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference MultiNLI MT-DNN Matched 86.7 #24 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference MultiNLI MT-DNN Mismatched 86.0 #24 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI MT-DNN % Test Accuracy 91.6 #10 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI MT-DNN % Train Accuracy 97.2 #10 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI MT-DNN Parameters 330m #10 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI Ntumpha % Test Accuracy 90.5 #12 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI Ntumpha % Train Accuracy 99.1 #12 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SNLI Ntumpha Parameters 220 #12 of 98 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference SciTail MT-DNN Accuracy 94.1 #2 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Paraphrase Identification Quora Question Pairs MT-DNN Accuracy 89.6 #10 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Paraphrase Identification Quora Question Pairs MT-DNN F1 72.4 #10 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis SST-2 Binary classification MT-DNN Accuracy 95.6 #22 of 87 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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