# Towards Better Few-Shot and Finetuning Performance with Forgetful Causal Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13432 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13432/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Self-Supervised Learning of Gait-Based Biomarkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16321/) (2023)
- [Enhancing next token prediction based pre-training for jet foundation models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04149/) (2025)
- [FedLNS: Leverage LayerNorm Signature Modeling to Mitigate Adversarial Manipulation in Federated LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18736/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLM) trained using the next-token-prediction objective, such as GPT3 and PaLM, have revolutionized natural language processing in recent years by showing impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities across a wide range of tasks. In this work, we propose a simple technique that significantly boosts the performance of LLMs without adding computational cost. Our key observation is that, by performing the next token prediction task with randomly selected past tokens masked out, we can improve the quality of the learned representations for downstream language understanding tasks. We hypothesize that randomly masking past tokens prevents over-attending to recent tokens and encourages attention to tokens in the distant past. We find that our method, Forgetful Causal Masking (FCM), significantly improves both few-shot and finetuning performance of PaLM. We further consider a simple extension, T-FCM, which introduces bidirectional context to causal language model without altering the sequence order, and further improves finetuning performance.