UniBERT: Adversarial Training for Language-Universal Representations

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12608v3
• Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:01:37 GMT
• Title: UniBERT: Adversarial Training for Language-Universal Representations
• Authors: Andrei-Marius Avram, Marian Lupaşcu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Ionuţ Mironică, Ştefan Trăuşan-Matu,
• Abstract summary: UniBERT is a compact multilingual language model that uses an innovative training framework that integrates three components: masked language modeling, adversarial training, and knowledge distillation.<n>UniBERT is designed to reduce the computational demands of large-scale models while maintaining competitive performance across various natural language processing tasks.
• Score: 2.294953003828613
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper presents UniBERT, a compact multilingual language model that uses an innovative training framework that integrates three components: masked language modeling, adversarial training, and knowledge distillation. Pre-trained on a meticulously curated Wikipedia corpus spanning 107 languages, UniBERT is designed to reduce the computational demands of large-scale models while maintaining competitive performance across various natural language processing tasks. Comprehensive evaluations on four tasks - named entity recognition, natural language inference, question answering, and semantic textual similarity - demonstrate that our multilingual training strategy enhanced by an adversarial objective significantly improves cross-lingual generalization. Specifically, UniBERT models show an average relative improvement of 7.72% over traditional baselines, which achieved an average relative improvement of only 1.17%, and statistical analysis confirms the significance of these gains (p-value = 0.0181). This work highlights the benefits of combining adversarial training and knowledge distillation to build scalable and robust language models, thus advancing the field of multilingual and cross-lingual natural language processing.

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