Papers › The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding

The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding

19 Feb 2020ACL 2020 6arXiv:2002.07972archive 2025-07-28

Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao

We present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding (NLU) toolkit that makes it easy for researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models. Built upon PyTorch and Transformers, MT-DNN is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks, using a variety of objectives (classification, regression, structured prediction) and text encoders (e.g., RNNs, BERT, RoBERTa, UniLM). A unique feature of MT-DNN is its built-in support for robust and transferable learning using the adversarial multi-task learning paradigm. To enable efficient production deployment, MT-DNN supports multi-task knowledge distillation, which can substantially compress a deep neural model without significant performance drop. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MT-DNN on a wide range of NLU applications across general and biomedical domains. The software and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/namisan/mt-dnn.

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namisan/mt-dnn officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
chunhuililili/mt_dnn mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
microsoft/MT-DNN mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Knowledge DistillationMulti-Task LearningNatural Language UnderstandingStructured Prediction

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

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