Related papers: Revisiting Methods for Finding Influential Example…

Modern ML systems ingest data aggregated from diverse sources, such as synthetic, human-annotated, and live customer traffic. Understanding \textit{which} examples are important to the performance of a learning algorithm is crucial for…

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful paradigm emerged from large language models (LLMs). Despite its promises, ICL performance is known to be highly sensitive to input examples. In this work, we use $\textit{in-context influences}$ to…

Active learning (AL) concerns itself with learning a model from as few labelled data as possible through actively and iteratively querying an oracle with selected unlabelled samples. In this paper, we focus on analyzing a popular type of AL…

A dataset has been classified by some unknown classifier into two types of points. What were the most important factors in determining the classification outcome? In this work, we employ an axiomatic approach in order to uniquely…

Continual Learning (CL) sequentially learns new tasks like human beings, with the goal to achieve better Stability (S, remembering past tasks) and Plasticity (P, adapting to new tasks). Due to the fact that past training data is not…

Curriculum learning, a training technique where data is presented to the model in order of example difficulty (e.g., from simpler to more complex documents), has shown limited success for pre-training language models. In this work, we…

Influence estimation analyzes how changes to the training data can lead to different model predictions; this analysis can help us better understand these predictions, the models making those predictions, and the data sets they're trained…

The Influence Function (IF) is a widely used technique for assessing the impact of individual training samples on model predictions. However, existing IF methods often fail to provide reliable influence estimates in deep neural networks,…

Large-scale black-box models have become ubiquitous across numerous applications. Understanding the influence of individual training data sources on predictions made by these models is crucial for improving their trustworthiness. Current…

Training data attribution (TDA) methods offer to trace a model's prediction on any given example back to specific influential training examples. Existing approaches do so by assigning a scalar influence score to each training example, under…

Diffusion models have led to significant advancements in generative modelling. Yet their widespread adoption poses challenges regarding data attribution and interpretability. In this paper, we aim to help address such challenges in…

We study how training data contributes to the emergence of toxic behaviors in large language models. Most prior work on reducing model toxicity adopts reactive approaches, such as fine-tuning pre-trained (and potentially toxic) models to…

Machine learning systems such as large scale recommendation systems or natural language processing systems are usually trained on billions of training points and are associated with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters. Improving…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling few-shot learning without the need for gradient updates. Despite its advantages, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the choice of…

Study samples often differ from the target populations of inference and policy decisions in non-random ways. Researchers typically believe that such departures from random sampling -- due to changes in the population over time and space, or…

Finding the best way of adapting pre-trained language models to a task is a big challenge in current NLP. Just like the previous generation of task-tuned models (TT), models that are adapted to tasks via in-context-learning (ICL) are robust…

Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…

Understanding the process of learning in neural networks is crucial for improving their performance and interpreting their behavior. This can be approximately understood by asking how a model's output is influenced when we fine-tune on a…

How can we explain the predictions of a black-box model? In this paper, we use influence functions -- a classic technique from robust statistics -- to trace a model's prediction through the learning algorithm and back to its training data,…

Training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to attribute model outputs back to specific training examples, and the application of these methods to large language model (LLM) outputs could significantly advance model transparency and data…