Nihal Jain


2023

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ContraCLM: Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model
Nihal Jain | Dejiao Zhang | Wasi Uddin Ahmad | Zijian Wang | Feng Nan | Xiaopeng Li | Ming Tan | Ramesh Nallapati | Baishakhi Ray | Parminder Bhatia | Xiaofei Ma | Bing Xiang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite exciting progress in causal language models, the expressiveness of their representations is largely limited due to poor discrimination ability. To remedy this issue, we present CONTRACLM, a novel contrastive learning framework at both the token-level and the sequence-level. We assess CONTRACLM on a variety of downstream tasks. We show that CONTRACLM enhances the discrimination of representations and bridges the gap with encoder-only models, which makes causal language models better suited for tasks beyond language generation. Specifically, we attain 44% relative improvement on the Semantic Textual Similarity tasks and 34% on Code-to-Code Search tasks. Furthermore, by improving the expressiveness of representations, CONTRACLM also boosts the source code generation capability with 9% relative improvement on execution accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark.