Related papers: How BPE Affects Memorization in Transformers
For different language pairs, word-level neural machine translation (NMT) models with a fixed-size vocabulary suffer from the same problem of representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The common practice usually replaces all these rare or…
The pretraining data of today's strongest language models is opaque; in particular, little is known about the proportions of various domains or languages represented. In this work, we tackle a task which we call data mixture inference,…
Due to the sensitive nature of personally identifiable information (PII), its owners may have the authority to control its inclusion or request its removal from large-language model (LLM) training. Beyond this, PII may be added or removed…
Language models can largely benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical BPE algorithm, a simple and reliable method. This has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal…
Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In…
In recent years, pre-trained Transformers have dominated the majority of NLP benchmark tasks. Many variants of pre-trained Transformers have kept breaking out, and most focus on designing different pre-training objectives or variants of…
There has been considerable interest in using surprisal from Transformer-based language models (LMs) as predictors of human sentence processing difficulty. Recent work has observed an inverse scaling relationship between Transformers'…
NLP is currently dominated by general-purpose pretrained language models like RoBERTa, which achieve strong performance on NLU tasks through pretraining on billions of words. But what exact knowledge or skills do Transformer LMs learn from…
Recent large language models have been trained on vast datasets, but also often on repeated data, either intentionally for the purpose of upweighting higher quality data, or unintentionally because data deduplication is not perfect and the…
Large language models have been shown to memorize significant portions of their training data, which they can reproduce when appropriately prompted. This work investigates the impact of simple pruning techniques on this behavior. Our…
Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures, while achieving state-of-the-art results on a large number of NLP tasks, can still suffer from overfitting during training. In practice, this is usually countered either by applying…
Machine-translated data is widely used in multilingual NLP, particularly when native text is scarce. However, translated text differs systematically from native text. This phenomenon is known as translationese, and it reflects both traces…
Named entity recognition (NER) is a vital task in spoken language understanding, which aims to identify mentions of named entities in text e.g., from transcribed speech. Existing neural models for NER rely mostly on dedicated word-level…
Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…
While recent research increasingly showcases the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is equally crucial to examine their associated risks. Among these, privacy and security vulnerabilities are particularly…
Despite the recent success of deep neural networks in natural language processing (NLP), their interpretability remains a challenge. We analyze the representations learned by neural machine translation models at various levels of…
To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to…
The Byte Pair Encoding algorithm can be safely batched to merge hundreds of pairs of tokens at a time when building up a tokenizer's vocabulary. This technique combined with reducing the memory footprint of text used in vocabulary training…
Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…
The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer models significantly limits their ability to generalize over long temporal durations. Memory-augmentation, or the explicit storing of past information in external…