Question: Does BERT outperfom Transformer-XL?
Evidence: All BERT experiments were trained for 500K steps. The code was written in Python and we used the Tensorflow libraries to create the models. The experiments were trained on a single NVIDIA Tesla V100 32 GB graphic card. The data was first processed into Tensorflow records as the input to the model. The set of hyperparameters which we found optimal after experimenting with different sets are in (Table TABREF10).
This set of parameters were chosen as there training performances were better than smaller models on modelling the long sequences of sub-words. We use the Adam optimizer BIBREF16 same as the English BERT. A maximum sequence length of 300 encompasses 98 percent of the training data and also allows us to fit larger models on the GPU card. Hyper-parameter optimization is very difficult in case of these models as they take around 15 days to train given the resources. The hyperparameter choices were therefore more dependant on the original BERT with little tweaks. We assess the training performance of the the model in the (Table TABREF11).
When we train the BERT model we mask some percentage of the input tokens at random, and then predict those masked tokens, this is known as Masked LM. The masked LM loss, refers specifically to the loss when the masked language model predicts on the masked tokens. The masked LM accuracy refers specifically to the accuracy with which the model predicts on the masked tokens. The loss for both the models are far off from the Masked LM loss of the English BERT, key difference being the pre-training data for both the language models are quite different. Google training their model on 3.3 Billion words from BooksCorpus BIBREF17 and the English Wikipedia and our model being trained on 144 million words. Comparing the two Finnish models, the left-marked model has a better training performance than left+right-marked model.
The results of the pseudo-perplexity described in the previous section to evaluate the above models on the test data-set is in table (Table TABREF12).The test dataset is of a different context when compared to the training data, and interestingly both the models are quite confident when it comes to the test dataset. The pseudo-perplexity values of left-marked are lower when compared to left-right-marked signifying that it is more confident.
We cannot directly compare the perplexity scores BERT model with a unidirectional LSTM model as both are calculated in a different manner. We can experiment to compare it with a Bi-directional LSTM or use a downstreaming task to compare both the performances. We could also randomly mask tokens and then compare the prediction accuracy on the masked tokens.
All Transformer-XL experiments are also trained equally for 500K steps. The code was written in Python and we used the PyTorch libraries for model creation. The experiments were trained on a single NVIDIA Tesla V100 32 GB graphic card. Two sets of hyperparameters were chosen to be compared after some initial optimization and are in (Table TABREF14)
From the above parameter choice, we wanted to experiment, whether providing more Segment and Memory length is advantageous (longer context) than a larger model. These parameters where chosen after some hyperparameter optimization. Same as for BERT we use the Adam optimizer, but we also use a cosine annealing learning rate scheduler to speed-up training BIBREF18. The training performance results are in (Table TABREF15)
As opposed to BERT, the left+right-marked models have a better training performance than their counterpart. Interestingly the larger model trains much better when compared to providing larger contexts. The same set of parameters for the 32-32 model cannot be replicated for 150-150 model as the latter takes a lot of space on the GPU card. The test set is same as that used with BERT and the results are in (Table TABREF16). The test performance is similar to that of the training performance with left-right-marked large model(32-32) performing the best. We can directly compare the perplexity scores with the previous best BIBREF19 as both are unidirectional models, Transformer-XL model has outperformed the latter by 27%.
Transformer-XL and BERT both have low perplexity and pseudo-perplexity scores, but both cannot be directly compared as they are calculated quite differently (Eq.DISPLAY_FORM4, Eq.DISPLAY_FORM6). The dramatically low scores of BERT indicate that per word predicted probability is higher than that of a uni-directional model. Thus the predicted word probability distribution is much sharper when compared to the XL model probability distribution. At this point, we cannot say which model architecture has performed better- BERT or Transformer-XL, despite both of them achieving good low perplexity scores. We would need to experiment with a downstreaming task in-order to fairly compare model performances.
At this point, we cannot say which model architecture has performed better- BERT or Transformer-XL, despite both of them achieving good low perplexity scores. We would need to experiment with a downstreaming task in order to fairly compare model performances.
Answer: No, cannot say which model architecture has performed better.