How Bidirectionality Helps Language Models Learn Better via Dynamic Bottleneck Estimation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00859v2
• Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2025 03:07:49 GMT
• Title: How Bidirectionality Helps Language Models Learn Better via Dynamic Bottleneck Estimation
• Authors: Md Kowsher, Nusrat Jahan Prottasha, Shiyun Xu, Shetu Mohanto, Chen Chen, Ozlem Garibay, Niloofar Yousefi,
• Abstract summary: Bidirectional language models have better context understanding and perform better than unidirectional models on natural language understanding tasks.<n>We propose FlowNIB, a dynamic and scalable method for estimating mutual information during training.<n>We show that bidirectional models retain more mutual information and exhibit higher effective dimensionality than unidirectional models.
• Score: 4.670329628077522
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Bidirectional language models have better context understanding and perform better than unidirectional models on natural language understanding tasks, yet the theoretical reasons behind this advantage remain unclear. In this work, we investigate this disparity through the lens of the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, which formalizes a trade-off between compressing input information and preserving task-relevant content. We propose FlowNIB, a dynamic and scalable method for estimating mutual information during training that addresses key limitations of classical IB approaches, including computational intractability and fixed trade-off schedules. Theoretically, we show that bidirectional models retain more mutual information and exhibit higher effective dimensionality than unidirectional models. To support this, we present a generalized framework for measuring representational complexity and prove that bidirectional representations are strictly more informative under mild conditions. We further validate our findings through extensive experiments across multiple models and tasks using FlowNIB, revealing how information is encoded and compressed throughout training. Together, our work provides a principled explanation for the effectiveness of bidirectional architectures and introduces a practical tool for analyzing information flow in deep language models.

Related papers

• Bidirectional Trained Tree-Structured Decoder for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition [51.66383337087724]
  The Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) task is a critical branch in the field of OCR. Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating bidirectional context information significantly improves the performance of HMER models. We propose the Mirror-Flipped Symbol Layout Tree (MF-SLT) and Bidirectional Asynchronous Training (BAT) structure.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-31T09:24:21Z)
• When Parameter-efficient Tuning Meets General-purpose Vision-language Models [65.19127815275307]
  PETAL revolutionizes the training process by requiring only 0.5% of the total parameters, achieved through a unique mode approximation technique. Our experiments reveal that PETAL not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in most scenarios but also surpasses full fine-tuning models in effectiveness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-16T17:13:08Z)
• Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory [64.71038763708161]
  Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) What further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. How the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-09T18:58:29Z)
• Variational Distillation for Multi-View Learning [104.17551354374821]
  We design several variational information bottlenecks to exploit two key characteristics for multi-view representation learning. Under rigorously theoretical guarantee, our approach enables IB to grasp the intrinsic correlation between observations and semantic labels.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-20T03:09:46Z)
• Visualizing the Relationship Between Encoded Linguistic Information and Task Performance [53.223789395577796]
  We study the dynamic relationship between the encoded linguistic information and task performance from the viewpoint of Pareto Optimality. We conduct experiments on two popular NLP tasks, i.e., machine translation and language modeling, and investigate the relationship between several kinds of linguistic information and task performances. Our empirical findings suggest that some syntactic information is helpful for NLP tasks whereas encoding more syntactic information does not necessarily lead to better performance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-03-29T19:03:10Z)
• Layer-wise Analysis of a Self-supervised Speech Representation Model [26.727775920272205]
  Self-supervised learning approaches have been successful for pre-training speech representation models. Not much has been studied about the type or extent of information encoded in the pre-trained representations themselves.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-10T02:13:25Z)
• InfoBERT: Improving Robustness of Language Models from An Information Theoretic Perspective [84.78604733927887]
  Large-scale language models such as BERT have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. Recent studies show that such BERT-based models are vulnerable facing the threats of textual adversarial attacks. We propose InfoBERT, a novel learning framework for robust fine-tuning of pre-trained language models.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-05T20:49:26Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.