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Do state-of-the-art models for language understanding already have, or can they easily learn, abilities such as boolean coordination, quantification, conditionals, comparatives, and monotonicity reasoning (i.e., reasoning about word…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…
The performance of sentence encoders can be significantly improved through the simple practice of fine-tuning using contrastive loss. A natural question arises: what characteristics do models acquire during contrastive learning? This paper…
The speed and accuracy with which robots are able to interpret natural language is fundamental to realizing effective human-robot interaction. A great deal of attention has been paid to developing models and approximate inference algorithms…
Subliminal learning describes a student language model inheriting a behavioral bias by fine-tuning on seemingly innocuous data generated by a biased teacher model. Prior work has begun to characterize this phenomenon but leaves open…
Generative AI has transformed the economics of information production, making explanations, proofs, examples, and analyses available at very low cost. Yet the value of information still depends on whether downstream users can absorb and act…
The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language…
Suppose we want to build a system that answers a natural language question by representing its semantics as a logical form and computing the answer given a structured database of facts. The core part of such a system is the semantic parser…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are theoretically Turing-complete and established themselves as a dominant model for language processing. Yet, there still remains an uncertainty regarding their language learning capabilities. In this…
We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on which no auto-regressive gradients are computed. This setting…
Visual prompting infuses visual information into the input image to adapt models toward specific predictions and tasks. Recently, manually crafted markers such as red circles are shown to guide the model to attend to a target region on the…
Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…
In-context learning enables language models (LM) to adapt to downstream data or tasks by incorporating few samples as demonstrations within the prompts. It offers strong performance without the expense of fine-tuning. However, the…
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled impressive multi-modal reasoning and understanding. Yet, whether these models truly grasp visual persuasion-how visual cues shape human attitudes and decisions-remains unclear.…
Conditionals are useful for modelling, but are not always sufficiently expressive for capturing information accurately. In this paper we make the case for a form of conditional that is situation-based. These conditionals are more expressive…
"Learning by Teaching (LbT)" helps learners deepen their understanding by explaining concepts to others, with questions playing a vital role in identifying knowledge gaps and reinforcing comprehension. However, existing systems for…
Understanding reader behaviors such as skimming, deep reading, and scanning is essential for improving educational instruction. While prior eye-tracking studies have trained models to recognize reading behaviors, they often rely on…