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Advancing State of the Art in Language Modeling (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Dec 19, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of sharing only code, researchers would also publish their model's word probabilities on test data, letting anyone add it to a combined model and see if it helps. Combining models set new best results on several language benchmarks, up to 10% better.

Abstract

Generalization is arguably the most important goal of statistical language modeling research. Publicly available benchmarks and papers published with an open-source code have been critical to advancing the field. However, it is often very difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to reproduce the results fully as reported in publications. In this paper, we propose a simple framework that should help advance the state of the art in language modeling in terms of generalization. We propose to publish not just the code, but also probabilities on dev and test sets with future publications so that one can easily add the new model into an ensemble. This has crucial advantages: it is much easier to determine whether a newly proposed model is actually complementary to the current baseline. Therefore, instead of inventing new names for the old tricks, the scientific community can advance faster. Finally, this approach promotes diversity of ideas: one does not need to create an individual model that is the new state of the art to attract attention; it will be sufficient to develop a new model that learns patterns which other models do not. Thus, even a suboptimal model can be found to have value. Remarkably, our approach has yielded new state-of-the-art results across various language modeling benchmarks up to 10%.

David Herel, Tomas Mikolov
arXiv:2312.03735 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Nov 28, 2023
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