Why you think you can’t draw and what to do about it — “I cannot tell you how happy I am that I have taken up drawing again. I had been thinking about it for a long time, but always considered it impossible and beyond my abilities” The above quote is taken from a letter written by Vincent van Gogh to his younger…

Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping — Finetuning pretrained language models like BERT on downstream tasks has become ubiquitous in NLP research and applied NLP. That’s in part because one can save a lot of time and money by using pretrained models. …

How to train faster, higher performant transformers — For over 2 years now, transformer models, pretrained on large corpora of text, are the state-of-the-art in all things NLP. Researchers and practitioners continue to push boundaries by inventing better architectures or training larger models on more data. Indeed few would disagree that, all else equal, training larger models on…