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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, effectively leveraging their vast knowledge for training smaller downstream models remains an open challenge, especially in domains like…
The success of many natural language processing (NLP) tasks is bound by the number and quality of annotated data, but there is often a shortage of such training data. In this paper, we ask the question: "Can we combine a neural network (NN)…
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…
Pretrained language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance when adapted to a downstream NLP task. However, theoretical analysis of these models is scarce and challenging since the pretraining and downstream tasks can be very…
Tokenisation is a core part of language models (LMs). It involves splitting a character sequence into subwords which are assigned arbitrary indices before being served to the LM. While typically lossless, however, this process may lead to…
We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large…
We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…
Many advances in Natural Language Processing have been based upon more expressive models for how inputs interact with the context in which they occur. Recurrent networks, which have enjoyed a modicum of success, still lack the…
Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…
Recent work on the Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) model has shown that off-loading memory from trainable weights to a retrieval database can significantly improve language modeling and match the performance of non-retrieval models…
Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two…
Neural language models (LMs) based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) are some of the most successful word and character-level LMs. Why do they work so well, in particular better than linear neural LMs? Possible explanations are that RNNs…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), serve as a fundamental building block for many sequence learning tasks, including machine translation, language modeling, and question answering. In this…
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are currently state-of-the-art for solving the vast majority of natural language processing tasks. While many real-world applications still require fine-tuning to reach satisfactory levels of…
Pre-training is crucial for large language models (LLMs), as it is when most representations and capabilities are acquired. However, natural language pre-training has problems: high-quality text is finite, it contains human biases, and it…
Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual…
Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…
Fine-tuning a pretrained transformer for a downstream task has become a standard method in NLP in the last few years. While the results from these models are impressive, applying them can be extremely computationally expensive, as is…
Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware…