Related papers: Knowledge Matters: Importance of Prior Information…

Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has achieved remarkable results in many NLP tasks. However, it is unclear why the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm can improve performance and generalization capability across different…

Imitation learning enables robots to learn and replicate human behavior from training data. Recent advances in machine learning enable end-to-end learning approaches that directly process high-dimensional observation data, such as images.…

Artificial neural networks can acquire many aspects of human knowledge from data, making them promising as models of human learning. But what those networks can learn depends upon their inductive biases -- the factors other than the data…

Large language models learn and continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic…

Most uses of machine learning today involve training a model from scratch for a particular task, or sometimes starting with a model pretrained on a related task and then fine-tuning on a downstream task. Both approaches offer limited…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for implicit data representation to evaluate similarity of input data using a trained neural network. In contrast to the previous approach, which uses gradients for representation, we utilize only…

Many machine learning approaches are characterized by information constraints on how they interact with the training data. These include memory and sequential access constraints (e.g. fast first-order methods to solve stochastic…

A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where…

Biological agents do not have infinite resources to learn new things. For this reason, a central aspect of human learning is the ability to recycle previously acquired knowledge in a way that allows for faster, less resource-intensive…

We study the problem of fine-tuning a language model (LM) for a target task by optimally using the information from $n$ auxiliary tasks. This problem has broad applications in NLP, such as targeted instruction tuning and data selection in…

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) aims at boosting the overall performance of each individual task by leveraging useful information contained in multiple related tasks. It has shown great success in natural language processing (NLP). Currently, a…

The prevailing paradigm for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs revolves around post-training on high-quality, reasoning-intensive data. While emerging literature suggests that reasoning data is increasingly incorporated also during…

Deep neural networks can empirically perform efficient hierarchical learning, in which the layers learn useful representations of the data. However, how they make use of the intermediate representations are not explained by recent theories…

Reasoning is an integral part of many tasks performed by language models (LMs). However, the effects of scaling model sizes and data on reasoning abilities at pretraining time remain understudied. To rigorously investigate this problem, we…

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the generalization of several related tasks by learning them jointly. As a comparison, in addition to the joint training scheme, modern meta-learning allows unseen tasks with limited labels during…

Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities but continue to struggle with arithmetic tasks. Prior works largely focus on outputs or prompting strategies, leaving the open question of the internal…

Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain…

The knowledge that humans hold about a problem often extends far beyond a set of training data and output labels. While the success of deep learning mostly relies on supervised training, important properties cannot be inferred efficiently…