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Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer

2019/10/23 by Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Raffel, Colin +16 · 4 voices · 1173 citations
Computer Science · #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling #cs.CL #cs.LG #stat.ML

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.10683

openalex publication_date 2019/10/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus'', we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.

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