Improving BERT Fine-Tuning via Self-Ensemble and Self-Distillation

2020/02/24 by Xu, Yige, Qiu, Xipeng, Zhou, Ligao +1
#Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.10345

Abstract

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models like BERT has become an effective way in NLP and yields state-of-the-art results on many downstream tasks. Recent studies on adapting BERT to new tasks mainly focus on modifying the model structure, re-designing the pre-train tasks, and leveraging external data and knowledge. The fine-tuning strategy itself has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we improve the fine-tuning of BERT with two effective mechanisms: self-ensemble and self-distillation. The experiments on text classification and natural language inference tasks show our proposed methods can significantly improve the adaption of BERT without any external data or knowledge.

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