Related papers: Meet in the Middle: A New Pre-training Paradigm

Training large language models (LLMs) typically involves pre-training on massive corpora, only to restart the process entirely when new data becomes available. A more efficient and resource-conserving approach would be continual…

Through an analysis of sequences generated by open-weight large language models (LLMs), we demonstrate that LLMs are heavily biased toward English. While continual pre-training is commonly used to adapt LLMs to a target language, we show…

Alignment training is crucial for enabling large language models (LLMs) to cater to human intentions and preferences. It is typically performed based on two stages with different objectives: instruction-following alignment and…

The non-humanlike behaviour of contemporary pre-trained language models (PLMs) is a leading cause undermining their trustworthiness. A striking phenomenon of such faulty behaviours is the generation of inconsistent predictions, which…

Whereas conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) systems map speech to text, and then text to intent, end-to-end SLU systems map speech directly to intent through a single trainable model. Achieving high accuracy with these…

As Machine Learning (ML) models grow in size and demand higher-quality training data, the expenses associated with re-training and fine-tuning these models are escalating rapidly. Inspired by recent impressive achievements of Large Language…

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…

This work introduces an approach to assessing phrase break in ESL learners' speech with pre-trained language models (PLMs). Different with traditional methods, this proposal converts speech to token sequences, and then leverages the power…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…

Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes available. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant…

Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, most of the LM pre-training objectives only focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn…

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly benefited from training on diverse, high-quality task-specific data, leading to impressive performance across a range of downstream applications. Current methods often rely on human-annotated…

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…

Numerous previous studies have sought to determine to what extent language models, pretrained on natural language text, can serve as useful models of human cognition. In this paper, we are interested in the opposite question: whether we can…

Large language models (LLMs) process and predict sequences containing text to answer questions, and address tasks including document summarization, providing recommendations, writing software and solving quantitative problems. We provide a…

Instruction tuning -- supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs -- is a key step in making pre-trained large language models (LLMs) instructable. Meanwhile, LLMs perform multitask learning during their pre-training, acquiring…

Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether it is still helpful to add the self-training method in the pre-training step and the fine-tuning step. Towards…

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) has become a representative foundation model in the natural language processing field. Most PLMs are trained with linguistic-agnostic pre-training tasks on the surface form of the text, such as the masked…

We propose a simple method to align multilingual contextual embeddings as a post-pretraining step for improved zero-shot cross-lingual transferability of the pretrained models. Using parallel data, our method aligns embeddings on the word…

Sequence-to-sequence models with an implicit alignment mechanism (e.g. attention) are closing the performance gap towards traditional hybrid hidden Markov models (HMM) for the task of automatic speech recognition. One important factor to…