ERNIE 5.0 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Chinese Lexical Analysis with Deep Bi-GRU-CRF Network

Lexical analysis is believed to be a crucial step towards natural language understanding and has been widely studied. Recent years, end-to-end lexical analysis models with recurrent neural networks have gained increasing attention. In this report, we introduce a deep Bi-GRU-CRF network that jointly models word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition tasks. We trained the model using several massive corpus pre-tagged by our best Chinese lexical analysis tool, together with a small, yet high-quality human annotated corpus. We conducted balanced sampling between different corpora to guarantee the influence of human annotations, and fine-tune the CRF decoding layer regularly during the training progress. As evaluated by linguistic experts, the model achieved a 95.5% accuracy on the test set, roughly 13% relative error reduction over our (previously) best Chinese lexical analysis tool. The model is computationally efficient, achieving the speed of 2.3K characters per second with one thread.