# Weighted Sampling for Masked Language Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.14225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [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)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [Representation Degeneration Problem in Training Natural Language Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12009/) (2019)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08473/) (2021)
- [On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05864/) (2020)
- [PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04337/) (2022)
- [Token Dropping for Efficient BERT Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13240/) (2022)
- [TaCL: Improving BERT Pre-training with Token-aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04198/) (2021)
- [Improved Universal Sentence Embeddings with Prompt-based Contrastive Learning and Energy-based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06875/) (2022)
- [InfoCSE: Information-aggregated Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06432/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Mask and You Shall Receive: Optimizing Masked Language Modeling For Pretraining BabyLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20475/) (2025)
- [BIRD: Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01589/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is widely used to pretrain language models. The standard random masking strategy in MLM causes the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to be biased toward high-frequency tokens. Representation learning of rare tokens is poor and PLMs have limited performance on downstream tasks. To alleviate this frequency bias issue, we propose two simple and effective Weighted Sampling strategies for masking tokens based on the token frequency and training loss. We apply these two strategies to BERT and obtain Weighted-Sampled BERT (WSBERT). Experiments on the Semantic Textual Similarity benchmark (STS) show that WSBERT significantly improves sentence embeddings over BERT. Combining WSBERT with calibration methods and prompt learning further improves sentence embeddings. We also investigate fine-tuning WSBERT on the GLUE benchmark and show that Weighted Sampling also improves the transfer learning capability of the backbone PLM. We further analyze and provide insights into how WSBERT improves token embeddings.