PALM: Pre-training an Autoencoding&Autoregressive Language Model for Context-conditioned Generation.

Self-supervised pre-training has emerged as a powerful technique for natural language understanding and generation, such as BERT, MASS and BART. The existing pre-training techniques employ autoencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train Transformer-based models by recovering original word tokens from corrupted text with some masked tokens. In this work, we present PALM which pre-trains an autoencoding and autoregressive language model on a large unlabeled corpus especially for downstream generation conditioned on context, such as generative question answering and conversational response generation. PALM minimizes the mismatch introduced by the existing denoising scheme between pre-training and fine-tuning where generation is more than reconstructing original text. With a novel pre-training scheme, PALM achieves new state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering (Rank 1 on the official MARCO leaderboard), abstractive summarization on Gigaword and conversational response generation on Cornell Movie Dialogues.