ul2-unifies-three-training-paradigms-single-objective
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Transformer_deep_learning_architecture-chunk-6-chunk-1.md
Created 2026-08-24T17:11:27+00:00
UL2 (Tay et al., 2023, arXiv:2205.05131) unifies masked language modeling, causal language modeling, and span-corruption objectives into a single training paradigm within one Transformer model.
Summary
Instead of forcing a model to specialize in one style of learning (predicting the next word, filling in blanks, or reconstructing damaged text), UL2 folds all three into a single training objective that one Transformer can learn. This matters because it removes the old split between "understanding" models and "generation" models, meaning one architecture can be used across tasks that previously required separate systems.