Related papers: Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models…
Large language models systematically fail when a salient surface cue conflicts with an unstated feasibility constraint. We study this through a diagnose-measure-bridge-treat framework. Causal-behavioral analysis of the ``car wash problem''…
Grounded language models use external sources of information, such as knowledge graphs, to meet some of the general challenges associated with pre-training. By extending previous work on compositional generalization in semantic parsing, we…
Neural language models (LMs) are arguably less data-efficient than humans from a language acquisition perspective. One fundamental question is why this human-LM gap arises. This study explores the advantage of grounded language acquisition,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…
The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…
In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more…
The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in…
A common use of NLP is to facilitate the understanding of large document collections, with a shift from using traditional topic models to Large Language Models. Yet the effectiveness of using LLM for large corpus understanding in real-world…
Larger language models have higher accuracy on average, but are they better on every single instance (datapoint)? Some work suggests larger models have higher out-of-distribution robustness, while other work suggests they have lower…
At the heart of machine learning lies the question of generalizability of learned rules over previously unseen data. While over-parameterized models based on neural networks are now ubiquitous in machine learning applications, our…
Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on…
Generalization of deep neural networks remains one of the main open problems in machine learning. Previous theoretical works focused on deriving tight bounds of model complexity, while empirical works revealed that neural networks exhibit…
How does the natural evolution of context paragraphs affect question answering in generative Large Language Models (LLMs)? To investigate this, we propose a framework for curating naturally evolved, human-edited variants of reading passages…
In this paper, we study the ability of large language models to learn specific mathematical rules such as distributivity or simplifying equations. We present an empirical analysis of their ability to generalize these rules, as well as to…
Large language models (LLMs) can produce erroneous responses that sound fluent and convincing, raising the risk that users will rely on these responses as if they were correct. Mitigating such overreliance is a key challenge. Through a…
It is generally accepted that starting neural networks training with large learning rates (LRs) improves generalization. Following a line of research devoted to understanding this effect, we conduct an empirical study in a controlled…
Why do larger language models generalize better? To investigate this question, we develop generalization bounds on the pretraining objective of large language models (LLMs) in the compute-optimal regime, as described by the Chinchilla…
This paper explores an intriguing observation: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with responses generated by a LLM often yields better results than using responses generated by humans, particularly in reasoning tasks. We conduct an…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently developed new advanced functionalities. Their effectiveness relies on statistical learning and generalization capabilities. However, they face limitations in internalizing the data they process and…