Related papers: Deriving Language Models from Masked Language Mode…

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capability in structured prediction tasks such as semantic parsing, few amounts of research have explored the underlying mechanisms of their success. Our work studies different…

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging natural language processing (NLP) task. Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTM) has brought this research field into a new era, in which the training objective plays a key…

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…

"He is a person", "Paris is located on the earth". Both statements are correct but meaningless - due to lack of specificity. In this paper, we propose to measure how specific the language of pre-trained language models (PLMs) is. To achieve…

We propose a Distributional Approach for addressing Controlled Text Generation from pre-trained Language Models (LMs). This approach permits to specify, in a single formal framework, both "pointwise" and "distributional" constraints over…

The remarkable success of pretrained language models has motivated the study of what kinds of knowledge these models learn during pretraining. Reformulating tasks as fill-in-the-blanks problems (e.g., cloze tests) is a natural approach for…

Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…

We propose Masker, an unsupervised text-editing method for style transfer. To tackle cases when no parallel source-target pairs are available, we train masked language models (MLMs) for both the source and the target domain. Then we find…

The usual way to interpret language models (LMs) is to test their performance on different benchmarks and subsequently infer their internal processes. In this paper, we present an alternative approach, concentrating on the quality of LM…

Language models (LMs) estimate a probability distribution over strings in a natural language; these distributions are crucial for computing perplexity and surprisal in linguistics research. While we are usually concerned with measuring…

Despite the success of pretrained masked language models (MLM), why MLM pretraining is useful is still a qeustion not fully answered. In this work we theoretically and empirically show that MLM pretraining makes models robust to…

Statistical model discovery is a challenging search over a vast space of models subject to domain-specific constraints. Efficiently searching over this space requires expertise in modeling and the problem domain. Motivated by the domain…

State of the art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a variety of benchmark tasks and are increasingly used as components in larger applications, where LLM-based predictions serve as proxies for human…

Adapting language models (LMs) to novel domains is often achieved through fine-tuning a pre-trained LM (PLM) on domain-specific data. Fine-tuning introduces new knowledge into an LM, enabling it to comprehend and efficiently perform a…

Recent work has suggested that language models (LMs) store both common-sense and factual knowledge learned from pre-training data. In this paper, we leverage this implicit knowledge to create an effective end-to-end fact checker using a…

Recently multi-lingual pre-trained language models (PLM) such as mBERT and XLM-R have achieved impressive strides in cross-lingual dense retrieval. Despite its successes, they are general-purpose PLM while the multilingual PLM tailored for…

Modern language models (LMs) are not robust to out-of-distribution inputs. Machine generated (``optimized'') prompts can be used to modulate LM outputs and induce specific behaviors while appearing completely uninterpretable. In this work,…

Multilingual language models have significantly advanced due to rapid progress in natural language processing. Models like BLOOM 1.7B, trained on diverse multilingual datasets, aim to bridge linguistic gaps. However, their effectiveness in…

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…

Language modeling has shifted in recent years from a distribution over strings to prediction models with textual inputs and outputs for general-purpose tasks. This position paper highlights the often overlooked implications of this shift…