Pretrained language models (PLMs) have established state-of-the-art performance across diverse natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. This study reveals that seman-tic-rich explanations of lexical units can effectively guide PLM learning processes. We propose a novel language understanding enhancement method with token interpretation (LUETI) that addresses two critical limitations in conventional PLMs: Incomplete token semantics caused by isolated contextual learning and insufficient semantic encoding in embedding matrices. LUETI operates through dual mechanisms, augmenting token represen-tations by integrating hidden states with corresponding token interpretations and refining embedding spaces using interpretation-derived semantic vectors for token prediction. LUETI, which is implemented as a plug-in module for standard architectures, demonstrates significant improvements on BERT and GLM, achieving average performance gains of 3.36% and 4.87% respectively on the SuperGLUE benchmark with equivalent parameters and training data. Note that LUETI-equipped models attain comparable performance to baseline PLMs using only 60% of pretraining data. Findings establish token interpretation as a computationally efficient but semantically powerful enhancement strategy for language model pretraining.
Tianyi Chen, Yashen Wang, Huan Chang et al.· IEEE/CAA Journal of Automati...· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful assets for recommender systems. However, deploying them as generative recommenders or zero-shot rankers at web-scale remains bottlenecked by prohibitive computational overhead and grounding challenges. In this paper, we revitalize the classic, highly efficient two-tower retrieval architecture by adapting LLMs as semantic representation backbones rather than generative engines. We introduce an LLM-native two-tower framework engineered for high-throughput, large-scale retrieval. Our architecture introduces several key innovations: a shared LLM encoder for joint user-item modeling, End-Of-Sentence (EOS) token pooling for compact sequence embedding, cross-dataset transfer learning, knowledge distillation from powerful cross-encoder teachers, and latent reasoning within the user tower. Extensive evaluation across three public benchmarks demonstrates that cross-encoder architecture outperforms current state-of-the-art (SoTA) models, while the efficient two-tower student achieves SoTA-comparable retrieval performance. Furthermore, experiments on internal large-scale production systems yield substantial topline retrieval improvements along with high resilience to model staleness and superior data scaling. Our findings demonstrate that when augmented with modern representation learning, the traditional two-tower paradigm remains an exceptionally competitive and practical solution for industrial retrieval systems.
Zhe Xu, Prachi Agrawal, Kavosh Asadi et al.· 0 citations
