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Papers
Papers that changed AI, with a plain-language explainer for each.
Total 199
- 2020
ELECTRA: Pre-training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Clark, Luong, Le and Manning that pre-trains text encoders by detecting replaced tokens instead of filling in masked ones, matching much larger baselines with far less compute.
- 2020
NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
arXiv
A 2020 paper by Mildenhall, Srinivasan, Tancik, Barron, Ramamoorthi and Ng that represents a scene as a neural radiance field: a network mapping 5D coordinates to density and colour, optimized from a sparse set of images with known camera poses.
- 2020
Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
arXiv
A 2020 paper finding that language model loss falls predictably, as a power law, with model size, data and compute. It gave labs a quantitative reason to build much larger models and shaped the scale-up that followed.
- 2019
Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
Nature
MuZero is a DeepMind reinforcement-learning algorithm that learns a model of its environment and plans inside that model, mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi without being given the rules of those games.
- 2019
On the Measure of Intelligence (ARC-AGI)
arXiv
A 2019 paper by Francois Chollet that defines intelligence as skill-acquisition efficiency and introduces the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), a benchmark of grid tasks that assumes no specialised knowledge or language.
- 2019
C4: Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (T5 paper)
JMLR
A 2019 paper that casts every language task as text-to-text, systematically compares transfer-learning choices, releases the C4 corpus and models, and reports state-of-the-art results on summarization, question answering, and classification.
- 2019
Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer (T5)
JMLR
A 2019 Google paper that frames every language task as text in, text out, using one encoder-decoder Transformer and one training setup. It also introduced the C4 dataset, and the released T5 models became common research starting points.
- 2019
Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism
arXiv 1909.08053
An NVIDIA paper from 2019 presenting an intra-layer model parallelism method, implemented with a few communication operations in native PyTorch, that trained transformer models of up to 8.3 billion parameters and improved several benchmarks.
- 2019
RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach
arXiv
A replication study of BERT pretraining that measures how much key hyperparameters and training data size matter, finds BERT was significantly undertrained, and shows a properly trained BERT matches or beats later models, reaching state of the art on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD.
- 2019
XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding
arXiv
XLNet is a generalized autoregressive pretraining method from a 2019 paper. It learns bidirectional contexts by maximizing expected likelihood over all factorization-order permutations and outperforms BERT on 20 tasks under comparable settings.
- 2019
HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?
arXiv
HellaSwag is a 2019 benchmark in which a machine must pick the most plausible continuation of a short event description. Its wrong answers are generated and filtered to fool models rather than people.
- 2019
SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems
arXiv
SuperGLUE is a benchmark for general-purpose language understanding, released in 2019 as a harder successor to GLUE. It bundles eight tasks, a single-number metric, an analysis toolkit and a public leaderboard.
- 2019
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (GPT-2)
OpenAI
OpenAI's 2019 paper on GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter Transformer trained on web text. It showed that a model trained only to predict the next word could perform several tasks when prompted, and its staged release sparked public debate.
- 2018
A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks
arXiv
This 2018 paper introduces a style-based GAN generator that separates high-level attributes from stochastic variation and allows scale-specific control, improving distribution quality, interpolation, and disentanglement.
- 2018
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
NAACL
Google's 2018 BERT paper introduced an encoder-only Transformer that reads text in both directions and is pre-trained by hiding words. It set new results on eleven language tasks and made download-and-fine-tune the default workflow.
- 2018
Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Andrew Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan that trained generative adversarial networks at the largest scale attempted at the time, introduced BigGANs and set a new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis.
- 2018
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Diederik P. Kingma and Prafulla Dhariwal presenting Glow, a flow-based generative model built on invertible 1x1 convolutions, which improved log-likelihood on standard benchmarks and could synthesise and manipulate large images.
- 2018
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
arXiv
A 2018 paper by Chen, Rubanova, Bettencourt and Duvenaud that replaces a fixed sequence of hidden layers with a neural network describing the derivative of the hidden state, so outputs are computed by an ODE solver — yielding continuous-depth models with constant memory cost.[^1]
- 2018
Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (GPT)
OpenAI
OpenAI's 2018 paper introducing GPT, a Transformer decoder pre-trained to predict the next token and then fine-tuned for specific tasks. It improved the state of the art on 9 of 12 tasks studied and set the recipe the GPT series followed.
- 2018
GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding
arXiv
GLUE is a benchmark and analysis platform that evaluates natural language understanding models across a diverse set of existing tasks, with an online comparison platform and a hand-crafted diagnostic suite for linguistic analysis.