Sanjika Hewavitharana

Mask More and Mask Later: Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Models by Disentangling the [MASK] Token

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and gather the contextualized information from unmasked tokens t…