# Can bidirectional encoder become the ultimate winner for downstream applications of foundation models?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.18021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18021/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2024.

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

- [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)
- [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)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [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)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past few decades, Artificial Intelligence(AI) has progressed from the initial machine learning stage to the deep learning stage, and now to the stage of foundational models. Foundational models have the characteristics of pre-training, transfer learning, and self-supervised learning, and pre-trained models can be fine-tuned and applied to various downstream tasks. Under the framework of foundational models, models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer(GPT) have greatly advanced the development of natural language processing(NLP), especially the emergence of many models based on BERT. BERT broke through the limitation of only using one-way methods for language modeling in pre-training by using a masked language model. It can capture bidirectional context information to predict the masked words in the sequence, this can improve the feature extraction ability of the model. This makes the model very useful for downstream tasks, especially for specialized applications. The model using the bidirectional encoder can better understand the domain knowledge and be better applied to these downstream tasks. So we hope to help understand how this technology has evolved and improved model performance in various natural language processing tasks under the background of foundational models and reveal its importance in capturing context information and improving the model's performance on downstream tasks. This article analyzes one-way and bidirectional models based on GPT and BERT and compares their differences based on the purpose of the model. It also briefly analyzes BERT and the improvements of some models based on BERT. The model's performance on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD) and General Language Understanding Evaluation(GLUE) was compared.