{"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/unsupervised-improvement-of-factual-knowledge","title":"Unsupervised Improvement of Factual Knowledge in Language Models","arxiv_id":"2304.01597","date":"2023-04-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nafis Sadeq","Byungkyu Kang","Prarit Lamba","Julian McAuley"],"abstract":"Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach for influencing MLM pretraining in a way that can improve language model performance on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks. We force the language model to prioritize informative words in a fully unsupervised way. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of pretrained language models on tasks such as factual recall, question answering, sentiment analysis, and natural language inference in a closed-book setting.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.01597v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01597v1.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":"unsupervised-improvement-of-factual-knowledge","repo_url":"https://github.com/intuit/wmlm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"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-inference","task_name":"Natural Language Inference"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"sentiment-analysis","task_name":"Sentiment Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2304.01597","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}