# Relative Position Prediction as Pre-training for Text Encoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01145/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Rewiring with Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12674/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Position Prediction as an Effective Pretraining Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07611/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Meaning is defined by the company it keeps. However, company is two-fold: It's based on the identity of tokens and also on their position (topology). We argue that a position-centric perspective is more general and useful. The classic MLM and CLM objectives in NLP are easily phrased as position predictions over the whole vocabulary. Adapting the relative position encoding paradigm in NLP to create relative labels for self-supervised learning, we seek to show superior pre-training judged by performance on downstream tasks.