Related papers: Insights into Pre-training via Simpler Synthetic T…
This paper introduces PRIMETIME, a synthetic generator that supports both benchmarking and fine-tuning of two primitive operations underlying temporal reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs): parsing and arithmetic on datetimes. Existing…
Continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to new datasets without losing performance on previously learned data, often assuming that prior data is no longer available. However, in many practical scenarios, both old and new data are…
Over recent years, an increasing amount of compute and data has been poured into training large language models (LLMs), usually by doing one-pass learning on as many tokens as possible randomly selected from large-scale web corpora. While…
The advent of transformer-based architectures and large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Since these LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data from the web and…
Particularly in low-data regimes, an outstanding challenge in machine learning is developing principled techniques for augmenting our models with suitable priors. This is to encourage them to learn in ways that are compatible with our…
Synthetic image data generation represents a promising avenue for training deep learning models, particularly in the realm of transfer learning, where obtaining real images within a specific domain can be prohibitively expensive due to…
Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…
A central goal of unsupervised learning is to acquire representations from unlabeled data or experience that can be used for more effective learning of downstream tasks from modest amounts of labeled data. Many prior unsupervised learning…
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted for synthetic data generation, significantly reducing annotation costs. However, most existing studies treat synthesis as a set of isolated tasks and overlook a more fundamental…
Self-supervised learning (SSL), as a newly emerging unsupervised representation learning paradigm, generally follows a two-stage learning pipeline: 1) learning invariant and discriminative representations with auto-annotation pretext(s),…
The pretrain-finetune paradigm usually improves downstream performance over training a model from scratch on the same task, becoming commonplace across many areas of machine learning. While pretraining is empirically observed to be…
Recent work has found that multi-task training with a large number of diverse tasks can uniformly improve downstream performance on unseen target tasks. In contrast, literature on task transferability has established that the choice of…
The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…
Pretraining techniques leveraging enormous datasets have driven recent advances in text summarization. While folk explanations suggest that knowledge transfer accounts for pretraining's benefits, little is known about why it works or what…
Fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a downstream task often degrades its original capabilities, a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". This is especially an issue when one does not have access to the data and recipe used to develop…
We introduce transductive program synthesis, a new formulation of the program synthesis task that explicitly leverages test inputs during synthesis. While prior approaches to program synthesis--whether based on natural language descriptions…
Many reasoning, planning, and problem-solving tasks share an intrinsic algorithmic nature: correctly simulating each step is a sufficient condition to solve them correctly. We collect pairs of naturalistic and synthetic reasoning tasks to…
Recent works found that fine-tuning and joint training---two popular approaches for transfer learning---do not always improve accuracy on downstream tasks. First, we aim to understand more about when and why fine-tuning and joint training…
*Data Synthesis* is a promising way to train a small model with very little labeled data. One approach for data synthesis is to leverage the rich knowledge from large language models to synthesize pseudo training examples for small models,…
Generating synthetic data through generative models is gaining interest in the ML community and beyond, promising a future where datasets can be tailored to individual needs. Unfortunately, synthetic data is usually not perfect, resulting…