# Bag of Tricks for Effective Language Model Pretraining and Downstream Adaptation: A Case Study on GLUE

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09268 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09268/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09223/) (2019)
- [SMART: Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-trained Natural Language Models through Principled Regularized Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03437/) (2019)
- [A Simple Method for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02847/) (2018)
- [Position Information in Transformers: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11090/) (2021)
- [Improving Adversarial Transferability via Neuron Attribution-Based Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00008/) (2022)
- [On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05864/) (2020)
- [SparseAdapter: An Easy Approach for Improving the Parameter-Efficiency of Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04284/) (2022)
- [SlotRefine: A Fast Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02693/) (2020)
- [Improving Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Fisher Mask for Better Generalization on Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05497/) (2022)
- [PANDA: Prompt Transfer Meets Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10160/) (2022)
- [Self-Attention with Cross-Lingual Position Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13310/) (2020)
- [Progressive Multi-Granularity Training for Non-Autoregressive Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05546/) (2021)
- [Toward Efficient Language Model Pretraining and Downstream Adaptation via Self-Evolution: A Case Study on SuperGLUE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01853/) (2022)
- [E2S2: Encoding-Enhanced Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14912/) (2022)
- [Frustratingly Simple Pretraining Alternatives to Masked Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01819/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Can ChatGPT Understand Too? A Comparative Study on ChatGPT and Fine-tuned BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10198/) (2023)
- [Diversifying the Mixture-of-Experts Representation for Language Models with Orthogonal Optimizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09762/) (2023)
- [Take Care of Your Prompt Bias! Investigating and Mitigating Prompt Bias in Factual Knowledge Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09963/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Token Dropping Strategy in Efficient BERT Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15273/) (2023)
- [Divide, Conquer, and Combine: Mixture of Semantic-Independent Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00434/) (2023)
- [Self-Evolution Learning for Discriminative Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15275/) (2023)
- [Prompt-Learning for Cross-Lingual Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10354/) (2023)
- [OmniForce: On Human-Centered, Large Model Empowered and Cloud-Edge Collaborative AutoML System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00501/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Sharpness-Aware Quantization for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13315/) (2023)
- [Everything is a Video: Unifying Modalities through Next-Frame Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10503/) (2024)
- [SALSA: Single-pass Autoregressive LLM Structured Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22691/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This technical report briefly describes our JDExplore d-team's submission Vega v1 on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) leaderboard, where GLUE is a collection of nine natural language understanding tasks, including question answering, linguistic acceptability, sentiment analysis, text similarity, paraphrase detection, and natural language inference. [Method] We investigate several effective strategies and choose their best combination setting as the training recipes. As for model structure, we employ the vanilla Transformer with disentangled attention as the basic block encoder. For self-supervised training, we employ the representative denoising objective (i.e., replaced token detection) in phase 1 and combine the contrastive objective (i.e., sentence embedding contrastive learning) with it in phase 2. During fine-tuning, several advanced techniques such as transductive fine-tuning, self-calibrated fine-tuning, and adversarial fine-tuning are adopted. [Results] According to our submission record (Jan. 2022), with our optimized pretraining and fine-tuning strategies, our 1.3 billion model sets new state-of-the-art on 4/9 tasks, achieving the best average score of 91.3. Encouragingly, our Vega v1 is the first to exceed powerful human performance on the two challenging tasks, i.e., SST-2 and WNLI. We believe our empirically successful recipe with a bag of tricks could shed new light on developing efficient discriminative large language models.