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

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 talk, I will discuss our recent paper where we explored the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts every language problem into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compared pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled datasets, 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 achieved state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. I will wrap up by discussing some of our ongoing and future work on transfer learning for NLP.

[BlockDesignz]

Colin breaks the mold of a typical researcher by also being extremely eloquent. Save some talent for the rest of us Colin!

[AR_]

So elegantly presented. Kudos to Colin and team!

[mishakhalman]

Great talk! Is the presentation available?

[billykotsos]

NO mention of "overfitting" anywhere in the past few years of these huge models and datasets. The fundamentals of ML are out the window