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Researcher profile

Zhuosheng Zhang

Zhuosheng Zhang contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionCryptography and SecurityInformation RetrievalHuman-Computer Interaction

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Published work

24 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Causal Probing for Internal Visual Representations in Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode and ground distinct visual concepts remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we propose a causal framework based on activation steering to actively probe and manipulate internal visual representations. Through systematic intervention across four visual concept categories, our results reveal a divergence in concept encoding: entities exhibit distinct localized memorization, whereas abstract concepts are globally distributed across the network. Critically, this divergence uncovers a mechanistic driver of scaling laws: increasing model depth is indispensable for encoding distributed and complex abstract concepts, whereas entity localization remains remarkably invariant to scale. Furthermore, reverse steering uncovers that blocking explicit output triggers a surge in latent activations, exposing a compensatory mechanism between perception and generation. Finally, extending our analysis to visual reasoning, we expose a disconnect between perception and reasoning although MLLMs successfully recognize geometric relations, they treat them merely as static visual features, failing to trigger the procedural execution necessary for abstract problem-solving.

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preprint2026arXiv

Faithful Mobile GUI Agents with Guided Advantage Estimator

Vision-language model based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown strong interaction capabilities. However, they often behave unfaithfully, relying on memorized shortcuts rather than grounding actions in displayed screen evidence or user instructions. To address this, we propose Faithful-Agent, a faithfulness-first framework that reformulates GUI interaction to prioritize evidence groundedness and internal consistency. Faithful-Agent employs a two-stage pipeline: (i) a faithfulness-oriented SFT stage to instill abstainment behaviors under evidence perturbations; (ii) an RFT stage that further amplifies faithfulness by introducing the guided advantage estimator (GuAE), an anchor-based and variance-adaptive advantage tempering mechanism built upon GRPO. GuAE prevents advantage collapse in low-variance rollout groups under sparse GUI rewards, and with a thought-action consistency reward, Faithful-Agent (Stage II) elevates the Trap SR from 13.88\% to 80.21\% relative to the baseline, while preserving robust general instruction-following performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Generalizable and Adaptive Continual Learning Framework for AI-generated Image Detection

The malicious misuse and widespread dissemination of AI-generated images pose a significant threat to the authenticity of online information. Current detection methods often struggle to generalize to unseen generative models, and the rapid evolution of generative techniques continuously exacerbates this challenge. Without adaptability, detection models risk becoming ineffective in real-world applications. To address this critical issue, we propose a novel three-stage domain continual learning framework designed for continuous adaptation to evolving generative models. In the first stage, we employ a strategic parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to develop a transferable offline detection model with strong generalization capabilities. Building upon this foundation, the second stage integrates unseen data streams into a continual learning process. To efficiently learn from limited samples of novel generated models and mitigate overfitting, we design a data augmentation chain with progressively increasing complexity. Furthermore, we leverage the Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) method to approximate the Hessian and alleviate catastrophic forgetting. Finally, the third stage utilizes a linear interpolation strategy based on Linear Mode Connectivity, effectively capturing commonalities across diverse generative models and further enhancing overall performance. We establish a comprehensive benchmark of 27 generative models, including GANs, deepfakes, and diffusion models, chronologically structured up to August 2024 to simulate real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our initial offline detectors surpass the leading baseline by +5.51% in terms of mean average precision. Our continual learning strategy achieves an average accuracy of 92.20%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

SE-GA: Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution for GUI Agents

Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents often struggle with multi-step tasks due to constrained context windows and static policies that fail to adapt to dynamic environments. To address these limitations, this work proposes the Self-Evolving GUI Agent (SE-GA), a novel framework that integrates hierarchical memory structures with an iterative self-improvement mechanism. At the core of our approach is Test-Time Memory Extension (TTME), which facilitates long-term planning by dynamically retrieving episodic, semantic, and experiential memories to provide salient contexts during inference. To ensure continuous learning, we introduce Memory-Augmented Self-Evolution (MASE), which is a training pipeline that adopts the data collected by TTME to stabilize and enhance the agent's foundational policy. Extensive evaluations across both offline and online benchmarks demonstrate SE-GA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching success rates of 89.0\% on ScreenSpot and 75.8\% on the challenging AndroidControl-High dataset. Furthermore, significant improvements on the AndroidWorld benchmark highlight the superior generalization to dynamic environments. Open source code: https://github.com/jinshilong-dev/SE-GA

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

BO-DBA: Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks via Bayesian Optimization

Decision-based attacks (DBA), wherein attackers perturb inputs to spoof learning algorithms by observing solely the output labels, are a type of severe adversarial attacks against Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) requiring minimal knowledge of attackers. State-of-the-art DBA attacks relying on zeroth-order gradient estimation require an excessive number of queries. Recently, Bayesian optimization (BO) has shown promising in reducing the number of queries in score-based attacks (SBA), in which attackers need to observe real-valued probability scores as outputs. However, extending BO to the setting of DBA is nontrivial because in DBA only output labels instead of real-valued scores, as needed by BO, are available to attackers. In this paper, we close this gap by proposing an efficient DBA attack, namely BO-DBA. Different from existing approaches, BO-DBA generates adversarial examples by searching so-called \emph{directions of perturbations}. It then formulates the problem as a BO problem that minimizes the real-valued distortion of perturbations. With the optimized perturbation generation process, BO-DBA converges much faster than the state-of-the-art DBA techniques. Experimental results on pre-trained ImageNet classifiers show that BO-DBA converges within 200 queries while the state-of-the-art DBA techniques need over 15,000 queries to achieve the same level of perturbation distortion. BO-DBA also shows similar attack success rates even as compared to BO-based SBA attacks but with less distortion.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Channel-aware Decoupling Network for Multi-turn Dialogue Comprehension

Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is one of the major goals of artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed an evolution from matching networks to pre-trained language models (PrLMs). In contrast to the plain-text modeling as the focus of the PrLMs, dialogue texts involve multiple speakers and reflect special characteristics such as topic transitions and structure dependencies between distant utterances. However, the related PrLM models commonly represent dialogues sequentially by processing the pairwise dialogue history as a whole. Thus the hierarchical information on either utterance interrelation or speaker roles coupled in such representations is not well addressed. In this work, we propose compositional learning for holistic interaction across the utterances beyond the sequential contextualization from PrLMs, in order to capture the utterance-aware and speaker-aware representations entailed in a dialogue history. We decouple the contextualized word representations by masking mechanisms in Transformer-based PrLM, making each word only focus on the words in current utterance, other utterances, and two speaker roles (i.e., utterances of sender and utterances of the receiver), respectively. In addition, we employ domain-adaptive training strategies to help the model adapt to the dialogue domains. Experimental results show that our method substantially boosts the strong PrLM baselines in four public benchmark datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art performance over previous methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Universal Multimodal Representation for Language Understanding

Representation learning is the foundation of natural language processing (NLP). This work presents new methods to employ visual information as assistant signals to general NLP tasks. For each sentence, we first retrieve a flexible number of images either from a light topic-image lookup table extracted over the existing sentence-image pairs or a shared cross-modal embedding space that is pre-trained on out-of-shelf text-image pairs. Then, the text and images are encoded by a Transformer encoder and convolutional neural network, respectively. The two sequences of representations are further fused by an attention layer for the interaction of the two modalities. In this study, the retrieval process is controllable and flexible. The universal visual representation overcomes the lack of large-scale bilingual sentence-image pairs. Our method can be easily applied to text-only tasks without manually annotated multimodal parallel corpora. We apply the proposed method to a wide range of natural language generation and understanding tasks, including neural machine translation, natural language inference, and semantic similarity. Experimental results show that our method is generally effective for different tasks and languages. Analysis indicates that the visual signals enrich textual representations of content words, provide fine-grained grounding information about the relationship between concepts and events, and potentially conduce to disambiguation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Distinguishing Non-natural from Natural Adversarial Samples for More Robust Pre-trained Language Model

Recently, the problem of robustness of pre-trained language models (PrLMs) has received increasing research interest. Latest studies on adversarial attacks achieve high attack success rates against PrLMs, claiming that PrLMs are not robust. However, we find that the adversarial samples that PrLMs fail are mostly non-natural and do not appear in reality. We question the validity of current evaluation of robustness of PrLMs based on these non-natural adversarial samples and propose an anomaly detector to evaluate the robustness of PrLMs with more natural adversarial samples. We also investigate two applications of the anomaly detector: (1) In data augmentation, we employ the anomaly detector to force generating augmented data that are distinguished as non-natural, which brings larger gains to the accuracy of PrLMs. (2) We apply the anomaly detector to a defense framework to enhance the robustness of PrLMs. It can be used to defend all types of attacks and achieves higher accuracy on both adversarial samples and compliant samples than other defense frameworks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Reference Knowledgeable Network for Machine Reading Comprehension

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) as a challenge requires models to select the most appropriate answer from a set of candidates with a given passage and question. Most of the existing researches focus on the modeling of specific tasks or complex networks, without explicitly referring to relevant and credible external knowledge sources, which are supposed to greatly make up for the deficiency of the given passage. Thus we propose a novel reference-based knowledge enhancement model called Reference Knowledgeable Network (RekNet), which simulates human reading strategies to refine critical information from the passage and quote explicit knowledge in necessity. In detail, RekNet refines finegrained critical information and defines it as Reference Span, then quotes explicit knowledge quadruples by the co-occurrence information of Reference Span and candidates. The proposed RekNet is evaluated on three multi-choice MRC benchmarks: RACE, DREAM and Cosmos QA, obtaining consistent and remarkable performance improvement with observable statistical significance level over strong baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yilin1111/RekNet.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Rethinking Textual Adversarial Defense for Pre-trained Language Models

Although pre-trained language models (PrLMs) have achieved significant success, recent studies demonstrate that PrLMs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. By generating adversarial examples with slight perturbations on different levels (sentence / word / character), adversarial attacks can fool PrLMs to generate incorrect predictions, which questions the robustness of PrLMs. However, we find that most existing textual adversarial examples are unnatural, which can be easily distinguished by both human and machine. Based on a general anomaly detector, we propose a novel metric (Degree of Anomaly) as a constraint to enable current adversarial attack approaches to generate more natural and imperceptible adversarial examples. Under this new constraint, the success rate of existing attacks drastically decreases, which reveals that the robustness of PrLMs is not as fragile as they claimed. In addition, we find that four types of randomization can invalidate a large portion of textual adversarial examples. Based on anomaly detector and randomization, we design a universal defense framework, which is among the first to perform textual adversarial defense without knowing the specific attack. Empirical results show that our universal defense framework achieves comparable or even higher after-attack accuracy with other specific defenses, while preserving higher original accuracy at the same time. Our work discloses the essence of textual adversarial attacks, and indicates that (1) further works of adversarial attacks should focus more on how to overcome the detection and resist the randomization, otherwise their adversarial examples would be easily detected and invalidated; and (2) compared with the unnatural and perceptible adversarial examples, it is those undetectable adversarial examples that pose real risks for PrLMs and require more attention for future robustness-enhancing strategies.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Sentence-aware Contrastive Learning for Open-Domain Passage Retrieval

Training dense passage representations via contrastive learning has been shown effective for Open-Domain Passage Retrieval (ODPR). Existing studies focus on further optimizing by improving negative sampling strategy or extra pretraining. However, these studies keep unknown in capturing passage with internal representation conflicts from improper modeling granularity. This work thus presents a refined model on the basis of a smaller granularity, contextual sentences, to alleviate the concerned conflicts. In detail, we introduce an in-passage negative sampling strategy to encourage a diverse generation of sentence representations within the same passage. Experiments on three benchmark datasets verify the efficacy of our method, especially on datasets where conflicts are severe. Extensive experiments further present good transferability of our method across datasets.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Structural Characterization for Dialogue Disentanglement

Tangled multi-party dialogue contexts lead to challenges for dialogue reading comprehension, where multiple dialogue threads flow simultaneously within a common dialogue record, increasing difficulties in understanding the dialogue history for both human and machine. Previous studies mainly focus on utterance encoding methods with carefully designed features but pay inadequate attention to characteristic features of the structure of dialogues. We specially take structure factors into account and design a novel model for dialogue disentangling. Based on the fact that dialogues are constructed on successive participation and interactions between speakers, we model structural information of dialogues in two aspects: 1)speaker property that indicates whom a message is from, and 2) reference dependency that shows whom a message may refer to. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu IRC benchmark dataset and contributes to dialogue-related comprehension.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Tracing Origins: Coreference-aware Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension is a heavily-studied research and test field for evaluating new pre-trained language models (PrLMs) and fine-tuning strategies, and recent studies have enriched the pre-trained language models with syntactic, semantic and other linguistic information to improve the performance of the models. In this paper, we imitate the human reading process in connecting the anaphoric expressions and explicitly leverage the coreference information of the entities to enhance the word embeddings from the pre-trained language model, in order to highlight the coreference mentions of the entities that must be identified for coreference-intensive question answering in QUOREF, a relatively new dataset that is specifically designed to evaluate the coreference-related performance of a model. We use two strategies to fine-tune a pre-trained language model, namely, placing an additional encoder layer after a pre-trained language model to focus on the coreference mentions or constructing a relational graph convolutional network to model the coreference relations. We demonstrate that the explicit incorporation of coreference information in the fine-tuning stage performs better than the incorporation of the coreference information in pre-training a language model.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Effective Character-augmented Word Embedding for Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension is a task to model relationship between passage and query. In terms of deep learning framework, most of state-of-the-art models simply concatenate word and character level representations, which has been shown suboptimal for the concerned task. In this paper, we empirically explore different integration strategies of word and character embeddings and propose a character-augmented reader which attends character-level representation to augment word embedding with a short list to improve word representations, especially for rare words. Experimental results show that the proposed approach helps the baseline model significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines on various public benchmarks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Multi-turn Dialogue Reading Comprehension with Pivot Turns and Knowledge

Multi-turn dialogue reading comprehension aims to teach machines to read dialogue contexts and solve tasks such as response selection and answering questions. The major challenges involve noisy history contexts and especial prerequisites of commonsense knowledge that is unseen in the given material. Existing works mainly focus on context and response matching approaches. This work thus makes the first attempt to tackle the above two challenges by extracting substantially important turns as pivot utterances and utilizing external knowledge to enhance the representation of context. We propose a pivot-oriented deep selection model (PoDS) on top of the Transformer-based language models for dialogue comprehension. In detail, our model first picks out the pivot utterances from the conversation history according to the semantic matching with the candidate response or question, if any. Besides, knowledge items related to the dialogue context are extracted from a knowledge graph as external knowledge. Then, the pivot utterances and the external knowledge are combined with a well-designed mechanism for refining predictions. Experimental results on four dialogue comprehension benchmark tasks show that our proposed model achieves great improvements on baselines. A series of empirical comparisons are conducted to show how our selection strategies and the extra knowledge injection influence the results.

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preprint2021arXiv

Open Named Entity Modeling from Embedding Distribution

In this paper, we report our discovery on named entity distribution in a general word embedding space, which helps an open definition on multilingual named entity definition rather than previous closed and constraint definition on named entities through a named entity dictionary, which is usually derived from human labor and replies on schedule update. Our initial visualization of monolingual word embeddings indicates named entities tend to gather together despite of named entity types and language difference, which enable us to model all named entities using a specific geometric structure inside embedding space, namely, the named entity hypersphere. For monolingual cases, the proposed named entity model gives an open description of diverse named entity types and different languages. For cross-lingual cases, mapping the proposed named entity model provides a novel way to build a named entity dataset for resource-poor languages. At last, the proposed named entity model may be shown as a handy clue to enhance state-of-the-art named entity recognition systems generally.

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preprint2021arXiv

SG-Net: Syntax Guided Transformer for Language Representation

Understanding human language is one of the key themes of artificial intelligence. For language representation, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy texts and getting rid of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive models attend to all words without explicit constraint, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this work, we propose using syntax to guide the text modeling by incorporating explicit syntactic constraints into attention mechanisms for better linguistically motivated word representations. In detail, for self-attention network (SAN) sponsored Transformer-based encoder, we introduce syntactic dependency of interest (SDOI) design into the SAN to form an SDOI-SAN with syntax-guided self-attention. Syntax-guided network (SG-Net) is then composed of this extra SDOI-SAN and the SAN from the original Transformer encoder through a dual contextual architecture for better linguistics inspired representation. The proposed SG-Net is applied to typical Transformer encoders. Extensive experiments on popular benchmark tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, and neural machine translation show the effectiveness of the proposed SG-Net design.

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preprint2021arXiv

Text Compression-aided Transformer Encoding

Text encoding is one of the most important steps in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It has been done well by the self-attention mechanism in the current state-of-the-art Transformer encoder, which has brought about significant improvements in the performance of many NLP tasks. Though the Transformer encoder may effectively capture general information in its resulting representations, the backbone information, meaning the gist of the input text, is not specifically focused on. In this paper, we propose explicit and implicit text compression approaches to enhance the Transformer encoding and evaluate models using this approach on several typical downstream tasks that rely on the encoding heavily. Our explicit text compression approaches use dedicated models to compress text, while our implicit text compression approach simply adds an additional module to the main model to handle text compression. We propose three ways of integration, namely backbone source-side fusion, target-side fusion, and both-side fusion, to integrate the backbone information into Transformer-based models for various downstream tasks. Our evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed explicit and implicit text compression approaches improve results in comparison to strong baselines. We therefore conclude, when comparing the encodings to the baseline models, text compression helps the encoders to learn better language representations.

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preprint2020arXiv

Accurate Word Representations with Universal Visual Guidance

Word representation is a fundamental component in neural language understanding models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PrLMs) offer a new performant method of contextualized word representations by leveraging the sequence-level context for modeling. Although the PrLMs generally give more accurate contextualized word representations than non-contextualized models do, they are still subject to a sequence of text contexts without diverse hints for word representation from multimodality. This paper thus proposes a visual representation method to explicitly enhance conventional word embedding with multiple-aspect senses from visual guidance. In detail, we build a small-scale word-image dictionary from a multimodal seed dataset where each word corresponds to diverse related images. The texts and paired images are encoded in parallel, followed by an attention layer to integrate the multimodal representations. We show that the method substantially improves the accuracy of disambiguation. Experiments on 12 natural language understanding and machine translation tasks further verify the effectiveness and the generalization capability of the proposed approach.

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preprint2020arXiv

DCMN+: Dual Co-Matching Network for Multi-choice Reading Comprehension

Multi-choice reading comprehension is a challenging task to select an answer from a set of candidate options when given passage and question. Previous approaches usually only calculate question-aware passage representation and ignore passage-aware question representation when modeling the relationship between passage and question, which obviously cannot take the best of information between passage and question. In this work, we propose dual co-matching network (DCMN) which models the relationship among passage, question and answer options bidirectionally. Besides, inspired by how human solve multi-choice questions, we integrate two reading strategies into our model: (i) passage sentence selection that finds the most salient supporting sentences to answer the question, (ii) answer option interaction that encodes the comparison information between answer options. DCMN integrated with the two strategies (DCMN+) obtains state-of-the-art results on five multi-choice reading comprehension datasets which are from different domains: RACE, SemEval-2018 Task 11, ROCStories, COIN, MCTest.

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preprint2020arXiv

Enhancing Pre-trained Language Model with Lexical Simplification

For both human readers and pre-trained language models (PrLMs), lexical diversity may lead to confusion and inaccuracy when understanding the underlying semantic meanings of given sentences. By substituting complex words with simple alternatives, lexical simplification (LS) is a recognized method to reduce such lexical diversity, and therefore to improve the understandability of sentences. In this paper, we leverage LS and propose a novel approach which can effectively improve the performance of PrLMs in text classification. A rule-based simplification process is applied to a given sentence. PrLMs are encouraged to predict the real label of the given sentence with auxiliary inputs from the simplified version. Using strong PrLMs (BERT and ELECTRA) as baselines, our approach can still further improve the performance in various text classification tasks.

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preprint2020arXiv

Knowledgeable Dialogue Reading Comprehension on Key Turns

Multi-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) requires models to choose the correct answer from candidate options given a passage and a question. Our research focuses dialogue-based MRC, where the passages are multi-turn dialogues. It suffers from two challenges, the answer selection decision is made without support of latently helpful commonsense, and the multi-turn context may hide considerable irrelevant information. This work thus makes the first attempt to tackle those two challenges by extracting substantially important turns and utilizing external knowledge to enhance the representation of context. In this paper, the relevance of each turn to the question are calculated to choose key turns. Besides, terms related to the context and the question in a knowledge graph are extracted as external knowledge. The original context, question and external knowledge are encoded with the pre-trained language model, then the language representation and key turns are combined together with a will-designed mechanism to predict the answer. Experimental results on a DREAM dataset show that our proposed model achieves great improvements on baselines.

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preprint2020arXiv

Machine Reading Comprehension: The Role of Contextualized Language Models and Beyond

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.

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preprint2020arXiv

Semantics-aware BERT for Language Understanding

The latest work on language representations carefully integrates contextualized features into language model training, which enables a series of success especially in various machine reading comprehension and natural language inference tasks. However, the existing language representation models including ELMo, GPT and BERT only exploit plain context-sensitive features such as character or word embeddings. They rarely consider incorporating structured semantic information which can provide rich semantics for language representation. To promote natural language understanding, we propose to incorporate explicit contextual semantics from pre-trained semantic role labeling, and introduce an improved language representation model, Semantics-aware BERT (SemBERT), which is capable of explicitly absorbing contextual semantics over a BERT backbone. SemBERT keeps the convenient usability of its BERT precursor in a light fine-tuning way without substantial task-specific modifications. Compared with BERT, semantics-aware BERT is as simple in concept but more powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art or substantially improves results on ten reading comprehension and language inference tasks.

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