Related papers: How does the task complexity of masked pretraining…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents significantly extend the capabilities of standalone LLMs, empowering them to interact with external tools (e.g., APIs, functions) and complete various tasks in a self-directed fashion. The challenge of tool…

Masked language modeling has become a widely adopted unsupervised technique to pre-train large language models (LLMs). However, the process of selecting tokens for masking is random, and the percentage of masked tokens is typically fixed…

While task-agnostic debiasing provides notable generalizability and reduced reliance on downstream data, its impact on language modeling ability and the risk of relearning social biases from downstream task-specific data remain as the two…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable empirical success through scaling model and data size, pretraining has become increasingly critical yet computationally prohibitive, hindering rapid development. Despite the availability of…

Prompt tuning and adapter tuning have shown great potential in transferring pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. In this work, we design a new type of tuning method, termed as regularized mask tuning, which…

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current…

Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive success on many software engineering tasks (e.g., code completion and code generation). By leveraging huge existing code corpora (e.g., GitHub),…

BERT set many state-of-the-art results over varied NLU benchmarks by pre-training over two tasks: masked language modelling (MLM) and next sentence prediction (NSP), the latter of which has been highly criticized. In this paper, we 1)…

The success of language Transformers is primarily attributed to the pretext task of masked language modeling (MLM), where texts are first tokenized into semantically meaningful pieces. In this work, we study masked image modeling (MIM) and…

Recently, decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks--a crucial part of human-like natural planning--to solve the given problem has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, leveraging such…

To what extent do LLMs use their capabilities towards their given goal? We take this as a measure of their goal-directedness. We evaluate goal-directedness on tasks that require information gathering, cognitive effort, and plan execution,…

We analyze the masked language modeling pretraining objective function from the perspective of the distributional hypothesis. We investigate whether better sample efficiency and the better generalization capability of models pretrained with…

Robots can adapt to user preferences by learning reward functions from demonstrations, but with limited data, reward models often overfit to spurious correlations and fail to generalize. This happens because demonstrations show robots how…

Improving pretraining data quality and size is known to boost downstream performance, but the role of text complexity--how hard a text is to read--remains less explored. We reduce surface-level complexity (shorter sentences, simpler words,…

Finetuning Pretrained Language Models (PLM) for IR has been de facto the standard practice since their breakthrough effectiveness few years ago. But, is this approach well understood? In this paper, we study the impact of the pretraining…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown capabilities close to human performance in various analytical tasks, leading researchers to use them for time and labor-intensive analyses. However, their capability to handle highly specialized and…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained and tested extensively on symbolic representations such as code and graphs, yet real-world user tasks are often specified in natural language. To what extent can LLMs generalize across these…

Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting.…

This survey reviews works in which language models (LMs) are augmented with reasoning skills and the ability to use tools. The former is defined as decomposing a potentially complex task into simpler subtasks while the latter consists in…

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the generalization of several related tasks by learning them jointly. As a comparison, in addition to the joint training scheme, modern meta-learning allows unseen tasks with limited labels during…