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In this paper, we investigate the inherent capabilities of transformer models in learning arithmetic algorithms, such as addition and parity. Through experiments and attention analysis, we identify a number of crucial factors for achieving…
Instruction tuning has been shown to be able to improve cross-task generalization of language models. However, it is still challenging for language models to complete the target tasks following the instructions, as the instructions are…
The Transformer model has a tendency to overfit various aspects of the training data, such as the overall sequence length. We study elementary string edit functions using a defined set of error indicators to interpret the behaviour of the…
This work finds limited evidence supporting the theory that using multiple tasks with sequence-to-sequence transformer language models can improve performance on some metrics. In particular, the multi-task generalist t5-small outperforms…
Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token…
The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method…
Task sequencing (TS) is one of the core open problems in Deep Learning, arising in a plethora of real-world domains, from robotic assembly lines to autonomous driving. Unfortunately, prior work has not convincingly demonstrated the…
Test-time scaling improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating extra compute to generate longer Chains-of-Thoughts (CoTs). This enables models to tackle more complex problem by breaking them down into…
Does continued scaling of large language models (LLMs) yield diminishing returns? In this work, we show that short-task benchmarks may give an illusion of slowing progress, as even marginal gains in single-step accuracy can compound into…
The ability to perform arithmetic tasks is a remarkable trait of human intelligence and might form a critical component of more complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate if the surface form of a number has any influence on how…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language processing, mathematical problem solving, and tasks related to program synthesis. However, their effectiveness in long-term planning and higher-order…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…
Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module:…
Large reasoning models achieve high accuracy through extended chain-of-thought but generate 5--8 more tokens than necessary, applying verbose reasoning uniformly regardless of problem difficulty. We propose Hint Tuning, a data-efficient…
One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases.…
Complex, multi-task problems have proven to be difficult to solve efficiently in a sparse-reward reinforcement learning setting. In order to be sample efficient, multi-task learning requires reuse and sharing of low-level policies. To…
Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…
We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…
In this work, we propose to progressively increase the training difficulty during learning a neural network model via a novel strategy which we call mini-batch trimming. This strategy makes sure that the optimizer puts its focus in the…
While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using…