Encoder–Decoders · 2023

UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms

Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Vinh Q. Tran, Xavier Garcia, et al.

UL2 introduces Mixture-of-Denoisers, a pretraining scheme that blends several span-corruption and prefix-language-modeling objectives with mode-switching tokens, producing a single model that works across both fine-tuning and in-context few-shot settings regardless of architecture.

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

UL2 trains on a mixture of denoising objectives (short spans, long spans, and sequential/prefix-LM corruption) and prepends a mode token that tells the model which denoising regime applies, letting it be switched between modes at inference. This bridges the gap where masked-denoising models excelled at fine-tuning while causal LMs excelled at few-shot prompting, giving one recipe that performs on both. The framework is architecture-agnostic and let a single pretrained model be adapted to supervised fine-tuning and prompting without choosing an objective in advance.

Knowledge graph

Relationships

Descendants

Source record

Provenance

Record ID
P-022
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.