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Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in practically every task in this field. However, the prevalent approach used in text generation,…
With the success of large-scale pre-training in language tasks, there is an increasing trend of applying it to the domain of life sciences. In particular, pre-training methods based on DNA sequences have received increasing attention…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT are being used for almost all language-related tasks, but interpreting their behavior still remains a significant challenge and many important questions remain largely unanswered. In this work,…
Scaling test-time compute via parallel sampling can substantially improve LLM reasoning, but is often limited by Best-of-N selection quality. Generative selection methods, such as GenSelect, address this bottleneck, yet strong selection…
Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the…
While recent work has shown that scores from models trained by the ubiquitous masked language modeling (MLM) objective effectively discriminate probable from improbable sequences, it is still an open question if these MLMs specify a…
Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for various NLP tasks. Pre-training is usually independent of the downstream task, and previous works have shown that this…
Large language models are increasingly used to curate bibliographies, raising the question: are their reference lists distinguishable from human ones? We build paired citation graphs, ground truth and GPT-4o-generated (from parametric…
Contextualized representations from a pre-trained language model are central to achieve a high performance on downstream NLP task. The pre-trained BERT and A Lite BERT (ALBERT) models can be fine-tuned to give state-ofthe-art results in…
This thesis focuses on improving the pre-training of natural language models using unsupervised raw data to make them more efficient and aligned with downstream applications. In the first part, we introduce three alternative pre-training…
The wide applicability and adaptability of generative large language models (LLMs) has enabled their rapid adoption. While the pre-trained models can perform many tasks, such models are often fine-tuned to improve their performance on…
Semantic sentence embedding models encode natural language sentences into vectors, such that closeness in embedding space indicates closeness in the semantics between the sentences. Bilingual data offers a useful signal for learning such…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized synthetic data generation, which in turn has the potential to simplify and broaden a wide gamut of NLP tasks. Here, we tackle a pervasive problem in synthetic data generation: its generative…
Despite the effectiveness of recurrent neural network language models, their maximum likelihood estimation suffers from two limitations. It treats all sentences that do not match the ground truth as equally poor, ignoring the structure of…
Despite impressive performance as evaluated on i.i.d. holdout data, deep neural networks depend heavily on superficial statistics of the training data and are liable to break under distribution shift. For example, subtle changes to the…
Pretraining NLP models with variants of Masked Language Model (MLM) objectives has recently led to a significant improvements on many tasks. This paper examines the benefits of pretrained models as a function of the number of training…
Tabular data is among the oldest and most ubiquitous forms of data. However, the generation of synthetic samples with the original data's characteristics remains a significant challenge for tabular data. While many generative models from…
Existing approaches for analyzing neural network activations, such as PCA and sparse autoencoders, rely on strong structural assumptions. Generative models offer an alternative: they can uncover structure without such assumptions and act as…
Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of…
Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. They however scale with man-hours and high-quality data. Masked Language Models (MLMs), such as BERT, scale with computing power as well as unstructured raw text data.…