Papers › s2s-ft: Fine-Tuning Pretrained Transformer Encoders for Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

s2s-ft: Fine-Tuning Pretrained Transformer Encoders for Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

26 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.13640archive 2025-07-28

Hangbo Bao, Li Dong, Wenhui Wang, Nan Yang, Furu Wei

Pretrained bidirectional Transformers, such as BERT, have achieved significant improvements in a wide variety of language understanding tasks, while it is not straightforward to directly apply them for natural language generation. In this paper, we present a sequence-to-sequence fine-tuning toolkit s2s-ft, which adopts pretrained Transformers for conditional generation tasks. Inspired by UniLM, we implement three sequence-to-sequence fine-tuning algorithms, namely, causal fine-tuning, masked fine-tuning, and pseudo-masked fine-tuning. By leveraging the existing pretrained bidirectional Transformers, experimental results show that s2s-ft achieves strong performance on several benchmarks of abstractive summarization, and question generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that the package s2s-ft supports both monolingual and multilingual NLG tasks. The s2s-ft toolkit is available at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/s2s-ft.

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Abstractive Text SummarizationQuestion GenerationQuestion-GenerationText Generation

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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