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Small neural networks with a constrained number of trainable parameters, can be suitable resource-efficient candidates for many simple tasks, where now excessively large models are used. However, such models face several problems during the…
The last decade in deep learning has brought on increasingly capable systems that are deployed on a wide variety of applications. In natural language processing, the field has been transformed by a number of breakthroughs including large…
Brain-LLM alignment is well established in English, yet the brain's language network is neuroanatomically universal across languages. Does alignment also generalize cross-linguistically, and what governs the variation? We test this using…
We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…
Adversarial examples have raised several open questions, such as why they can deceive classifiers and transfer between different models. A prevailing hypothesis to explain these phenomena suggests that adversarial perturbations appear as…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
Strong inductive biases allow children to learn in fast and adaptable ways. Children use the mutual exclusivity (ME) bias to help disambiguate how words map to referents, assuming that if an object has one label then it does not need…
High dimensional data can have a surprising property: pairs of data points may be easily separated from each other, or even from arbitrary subsets, with high probability using just simple linear classifiers. However, this is more of a rule…
Transformer-based models are now predominant in NLP. They outperform approaches based on static models in many respects. This success has in turn prompted research that reveals a number of biases in the language models generated by…
Borrowing from the transformer models that revolutionized the field of natural language processing, self-supervised feature learning for visual tasks has also seen state-of-the-art success using these extremely deep, isotropic networks.…
The susceptibility of modern machine learning classifiers to adversarial examples has motivated theoretical results suggesting that these might be unavoidable. However, these results can be too general to be applicable to natural data…
In strategic classification, the standard supervised learning setting is extended to support the notion of strategic user behavior in the form of costly feature manipulations made in response to a classifier. While standard learning…
Inductive biases are inherent in every machine learning system, shaping how models generalize from finite data. In the case of neural language models (LMs), debates persist as to whether these biases align with or diverge from human…
For human children as well as machine learning systems, a key challenge in learning a word is linking the word to the visual phenomena it describes. We explore this aspect of word learning by using the performance of computer vision systems…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
Learning with limited data is one of the biggest problems of machine learning. Current approaches to this issue consist in learning general representations from huge amounts of data before fine-tuning the model on a small dataset of…
Adults vary greatly in how effectively they learn a new language, but the signals driving the learning processes and individual differences remain unclear. Over seven days, we tracked behavioral learning and collected fMRI data from 102…
Recent research demonstrated that training large language models involves memorization of a significant fraction of training data. Such memorization can lead to privacy violations when training on sensitive user data and thus motivates the…
Empirical studies have identified a range of learnability biases and limitations of transformers, such as a persistent difficulty in learning to compute simple formal languages such as PARITY, and a bias towards low-degree functions.…
Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents has been taken to reflect a bias toward mutual exclusivity. This tendency may be advantageous both as (1) an ad-hoc referent selection heuristic to single out referents…