Related papers: Learning Better Masking for Better Language Model …

The large language model (LLM) is typically integrated into the mainstream optimization protocol. No work has questioned whether maintaining the model integrity is \textit{indispensable} for promising performance. In this work, we introduce…

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have shown superior performances in numerous downstream NLP tasks when used as text encoders. Unfortunately, MLMs also demonstrate significantly worrying levels of social biases. We show that the previously…

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the natural language processing landscape and brought to life diverse applications. Pretraining on vast web-scale data has laid the foundation for these models, yet the research community is now…

Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…

Multilingual pre-trained models exhibit zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, where a model fine-tuned on a source language achieves surprisingly good performance on a target language. While studies have attempted to understand transfer, they…

Alignment tuning has enabled large language models to excel in reasoning, instruction-following, and minimizing harmful generations. However, despite their widespread deployment, these models exhibit a monolingual bias, raising concerns…

The number of large language models (LLMs) with varying parameter scales and vocabularies is increasing. While they deliver powerful performance, they also face a set of common optimization needs to meet specific requirements or standards,…

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 prevailing paradigm in large language model (LLM) development is to pretrain a base model, then perform further training to improve performance and model behavior. However, hyperparameter optimization and scaling laws have been studied…

Masked language models (MLMs) are pre-trained with a denoising objective that is in a mismatch with the objective of downstream fine-tuning. We propose pragmatic masking and surrogate fine-tuning as two complementing strategies that exploit…

Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full…

Chemical Language Models (CLMs) pre-trained on large scale molecular data are widely used for molecular property prediction. However, the common belief that increasing training resources such as model size, dataset size, and training…

Recent advances in NLP are brought by a range of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs). These PLMs have brought significant performance gains for a range of NLP tasks, circumventing the need to customize complex designs for specific…

Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks,…

The meanings of words and phrases depend not only on where they are used (contexts) but also on who use them (writers). Pretrained language models (PLMs) are powerful tools for capturing context, but they are typically pretrained and…

Probing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) using prompts has indirectly implied that language models (LMs) can be treated as knowledge bases. To this end, this phenomena has been effective especially when these LMs are fine-tuned towards…

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs), leveraging a denoising objective that, in principle, should enable more uniform context utilisation. In…

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising results in integrating diverse modalities such as texts and images. MLLMs are heavily influenced by modality bias, often relying on language while…