Pretraining and fine-tuning language models have become the standard practice in industrial natural language processing (NLP), but developing and deploying general-purpose language models without the abundant computation or data resources is a real-world issue faced by smaller organizations or communities whose main focus is languages with less accessible resources (e.g., non-English). This paper explores the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) language model architecture as a more practical and compute-efficient alternative to the decoder-oriented approach (e.g., GPT-3), accompanied by novel findings in compute-optimality analyses. We successfully trained billion-scale Korean-language seq2seq language models that strongly outperform other competitive models in Korean benchmarks. Moreover, we demonstrate that such language models can be more efficiently utilized by employing a heavy pre-finetuning strategy, by showcasing a case study on dialog-task adaptation. Our case study shows that adopting language models with more readily available domain-specific unlabeled data greatly improves fine-tuning data efficiency in low-resource settings.

Large-scale language models such as GPT-3 are excellent few-shot learners, allowing them to be controlled via natural text prompts. Recent studies report that prompt-based direct classification eliminates the need for fine-tuning but lacks data and inference scalability. This paper proposes a novel data augmentation technique that leverages large-scale language models to generate realistic text samples from a mixture of real samples. We also propose utilizing soft-labels predicted by the language models, effectively distilling knowledge from the large-scale language models and creating textual perturbations simultaneously. We perform data augmentation experiments on diverse classification tasks and show that our method hugely outperforms existing text augmentation methods. We also conduct experiments on our newly proposed benchmark to show that the augmentation effect is not only attributed to memorization. Further ablation studies and a qualitative analysis provide more insights into our approach.

GPT-3 shows remarkable in-context learning ability of large-scale language models (LMs) trained on hundreds of billion scale data. Here we address some remaining issues less reported by the GPT-3 paper, such as a non-English LM, the performances of different sized models, and the effect of recently introduced prompt optimization on in-context learning. To achieve this, we introduce HyperCLOVA, a Korean variant of 82B GPT-3 trained on a Korean-centric corpus of 560B tokens. Enhanced by our Korean-specific tokenization, HyperCLOVA with our training configuration shows state-of-the-art in-context zero-shot and few-shot learning performances on various downstream tasks in Korean. Also, we show the performance benefits of prompt-based learning and demonstrate how it can be integrated into the prompt engineering pipeline. Then we discuss the possibility of materializing the No Code AI paradigm by providing AI prototyping capabilities to non-experts of ML by introducing HyperCLOVA studio, an interactive prompt engineering interface. Lastly, we demonstrate the potential of our methods with three successful in-house applications.