Should We Still Pretrain Encoders with Masked Language Modeling?
Authors: name: Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef; name: Nicolas Boizard; name: Manuel Faysse; name: Duarte M. Alves; name: Emmanuel Malherbe; name: André F. T. Martins; name: Céline Hudelot; name: Pierre Colombo
Published: 2025-07-01 17:45:48

Abstract: Learning high-quality text representations is fundamental to a wide range of
NLP tasks. While encoder pretraining has traditionally relied on Masked
Language Modeling (MLM), recent evidence suggests that decoder models
pretrained with Causal Language Modeling (CLM) can be effectively repurposed as
encoders, often surpassing traditional encoders on text representation
benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether these gains reflect an inherent
advantage of the CLM objective or arise from confounding factors such as model
and data scale. In this paper, we address this question through a series of
large-scale, carefully controlled pretraining ablations, training a total of 30
models ranging from 210 million to 1 billion parameters, and conducting over
15,000 fine-tuning and evaluation runs. We find that while training with MLM
generally yields better performance across text representation tasks,
CLM-trained models are more data-efficient and demonstrate improved fine-tuning
stability. Building on these findings, we experimentally show that a biphasic
training strategy that sequentially applies CLM and then MLM, achieves optimal
performance under a fixed computational training budget. Moreover, we
demonstrate that this strategy becomes more appealing when initializing from
readily available pretrained CLM models (from the existing LLM ecosystem),
reducing the computational burden needed to train best-in-class encoder models.
We release all project artifacts at https://hf.co/MLMvsCLM to foster further
research.