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Information retrieval methods often rely on a single embedding model trained on large, general-domain datasets like MSMARCO. While this approach can produce a retriever with reasonable overall performance, they often underperform models…

Recently, large-scale pre-trained speech encoders and Large Language Models (LLMs) have been released, which show state-of-the-art performance on a range of spoken language processing tasks including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). To…

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Model merging provides a scalable alternative to multi-task training by combining specialized finetuned models through parameter arithmetic, enabling efficient deployment without the need for joint training or access to all task data. While…

Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures have recently advanced the scalability and adaptability of large language models (LLMs) for continual multimodal learning. However, efficiently extending these models to accommodate sequential tasks…

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding tasks but continue to struggle with long-context comprehension, particularly with content located in the middle of extensive inputs. This limitation, known as the…

Large pretrained language models (PLMs) are often domain- or task-adapted via fine-tuning or prompting. Finetuning requires modifying all of the parameters and having enough data to avoid overfitting while prompting requires no training and…

The pre-training of masked language models (MLMs) consumes massive computation to achieve good results on downstream NLP tasks, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In the vanilla MLM, the virtual tokens, [MASK]s, act as placeholders and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on historical web data inevitably become outdated. We investigate evaluation strategies and update methods for LLMs as new data becomes available. We introduce a web-scale dataset for time-continual…

Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models through conditional computation. This paper presents a detailed empirical study of how autoregressive MoE language models scale in comparison with dense models in…

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to a continuous stream of tasks is a critical yet challenging endeavor. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have become a standard for this, they face a fundamental dilemma in continual…

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential for improving retrieval model performance; however, previous studies have mainly focused on dense retrieval trained with contrastive loss (CL), neglecting the scaling behavior…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is a common practice to adapt generalist models to specialized domains. However, recent studies show that fine-tuning can erode safety alignment, causing LLMs to respond to harmful or unethical…

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking…

Masked Language Model (MLM) framework has been widely adopted for self-supervised language pre-training. In this paper, we argue that randomly sampled masks in MLM would lead to undesirably large gradient variance. Thus, we theoretically…

Learned Sparse Retrievers (LSR) have evolved into an effective retrieval strategy that can bridge the gap between traditional keyword-based sparse retrievers and embedding-based dense retrievers. At its core, learned sparse retrievers try…

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become the key to scaling modern LLMs, yet little is understood about how their sparse routing dynamics respond to multilingual data. In this work, we analyze expert routing patterns using…

Model merging aggregates Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned on different tasks into a stronger one. However, parameter conflicts between models leads to performance degradation in averaging. While model routing addresses this issue by…

Masked language modelling (MLM) as a pretraining objective has been widely adopted in genomic sequence modelling. While pretrained models can successfully serve as encoders for various downstream tasks, the distribution shift between…