Related papers: How BPE Affects Memorization in Transformers
We present a simple method to improve neural translation of a low-resource language pair using parallel data from a related, also low-resource, language pair. The method is based on the transfer method of Zoph et al., but whereas their…
Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during…
We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…
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…
Recurrent neural networks can learn to predict upcoming words remarkably well on average; in syntactically complex contexts, however, they often assign unexpectedly high probabilities to ungrammatical words. We investigate to what extent…
Underlying mechanisms of memorization in LLMs -- the verbatim reproduction of training data -- remain poorly understood. What exact part of the network decides to retrieve a token that we would consider as start of memorization sequence?…
Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…
Human beings primarily understand the world through concepts (e.g., dog), abstract mental representations that structure perception, reasoning, and learning. However, how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and forget such…
Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…
Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning has recently gained significant attention, driven by the need to remove unwanted information, such as private, sensitive, or copyrighted content, from LLMs. However, conventional unlearning approaches…
The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few…
Existing NLP datasets contain various biases, and models tend to quickly learn those biases, which in turn limits their robustness. Existing approaches to improve robustness against dataset biases mostly focus on changing the training…
We show that in language learning, contrary to received wisdom, keeping exceptional training instances in memory can be beneficial for generalization accuracy. We investigate this phenomenon empirically on a selection of benchmark natural…
We introduce three simple randomized variants of byte pair encoding (BPE) and explore whether randomizing the selection of merge operations substantially affects a downstream machine translation task. We focus on translation into…
Currently, many studies view DNA sequences as a special type of language and utilize Transformers to model them. These studies use fixed-length k-mer segmentation and BPE subword tokenization but lack a systematic evaluation to determine…
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 pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems commonly leverage bag-of-words co-occurrence techniques to capture semantic and syntactic word relationships. The resulting word-level distributed representations often ignore morphological…
Tokenisation is the first step in almost all NLP tasks, and state-of-the-art transformer-based language models all use subword tokenisation algorithms to process input text. Existing algorithms have problems, often producing tokenisations…
Scaling laws enable the optimal selection of data amount and language model size, yet the impact of the data unit, the token, on this relationship remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate how the information…