What is: Electric?

Electric is an energy-based cloze model for representation learning over text. Like BERT, it is a conditional generative model of tokens given their contexts. However, Electric does not use masking or output a full distribution over tokens that could occur in a context. Instead, it assigns a scalar energy score to each input token indicating how likely it is given its context.

Specifically, like BERT, Electric also models $p\_{\text {data }}\left(x\_{t} \mid \mathbf{x}\_{\backslash t}\right)$, but does not use masking or a softmax layer. Electric first maps the unmasked input $\mathbf{x}=\left[x\_{1}, \ldots, x\_{n}\right]$ into contextualized vector representations $\mathbf{h}(\mathbf{x})=\left[\mathbf{h}\_{1}, \ldots, \mathbf{h}\_{n}\right]$ using a transformer network. The model assigns a given position $t$ an energy score

using a learned weight vector $w$. The energy function defines a distribution over the possible tokens at position $t$ as

where $\text{REPLACE}\left(\mathbf{x}, t, x^{\prime}\right)$ denotes replacing the token at position $t$ with $x^{\prime}$ and $\mathcal{V}$ is the vocabulary, in practice usually word pieces. Unlike with BERT, which produces the probabilities for all possible tokens $x^{\prime}$ using a softmax layer, a candidate $x^{\prime}$ is passed in as input to the transformer. As a result, computing $p_{\theta}$ is prohibitively expensive because the partition function $Z\_{\theta}\left(\mathbf{x}\_{\backslash t}\right)$ requires running the transformer $|\mathcal{V}|$ times; unlike most EBMs, the intractability of $Z\_{\theta}(\mathbf{x} \backslash t)$ is more due to the expensive scoring function rather than having a large sample space.