MT5¶
Overview¶
The mT5 model was presented in mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer by Linting Xue, Noah Constant, Adam Roberts, Mihir Kale, Rami Al-Rfou, Aditya Siddhant, Aditya Barua, Colin Raffel.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
The recent “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We describe the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. All of the code and model checkpoints
Note: mT5 was only pre-trained on mC4 excluding any supervised training. Therefore, this model has to be fine-tuned before it is useable on a downstream task, unlike the original T5 model. Since mT5 was pre-trained unsupervisedly, there’s no real advantage to using a task prefix during single-task fine-tuning. If you are doing multi-task fine-tuning, you should use a prefix.
Google has released the following variants: