Case Study

Pre-training Objective Choice for a Multi-Modal Enterprise Writing Assistant

You lead an internal team building an enterprise writing assistant that must (1) generate long, coherent policy drafts from a short prompt, (2) accurately fill in missing clauses inside existing documents during redlining, and (3) decide whether a proposed paragraph logically follows the previous paragraph in a policy (to flag non-sequiturs). You have budget to pre-train ONE base model from scratch and can choose ONE primary training objective; you may optionally add ONE auxiliary objective if you can justify why it complements the primary objective without undermining it. The candidate objectives are: causal language modeling, masked language modeling, denoising autoencoder reconstruction (corrupt input then reconstruct), permuted language modeling, and next sentence prediction.

Case constraints: Your training corpus is mostly internal policies and emails; at inference time the assistant must support both free-form generation and in-place editing. Early prototypes show two failure modes you must address: (A) generated drafts are locally fluent but drift off-topic after ~2 pages, and (B) in-place clause completion is often grammatically correct but contradicts a constraint stated later in the same paragraph.

Which objective would you choose as the PRIMARY objective, and which (if any) would you add as an AUXILIARY objective? In your answer, explicitly connect your choice to how information is (or is not) available to the model during training (bidirectional vs. left-to-right vs. permuted/denoising), and explain how your choice mitigates BOTH failure modes (A) and (B) while still supporting requirement (3) about paragraph-to-paragraph coherence.

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Updated 2026-02-06

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