ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training

This paper presents a new sequence-tosequence pre-training model called Prophet-Net, which introduces a novel self-supervised objective named future n-gram prediction and the proposed n-stream self-attention mechanism.

Instead of optimizing one-stepahead prediction in the traditional sequenceto-sequence model, the ProphetNet is optimized by n-step ahead prediction that predicts the next n tokens simultaneously based on previous context tokens at each time step. The future n-gram prediction explicitly encourages the model to plan for the future tokens and prevent overfitting on strong local correlations. We pre-train ProphetNet using a base scale dataset (16GB) and a large-scale dataset (160GB), respectively. Then we conduct experiments on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks for abstractive summarization and question generation tasks. Experimental results show that Prophet-Net achieves new state-of-the-art results on all these datasets compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus.