Related papers: Improving Length-Generalization in Transformers vi…
The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges,…
Multi-task learning can leverage information learned by one task to benefit the training of other tasks. Despite this capacity, naively training all tasks together in one model often degrades performance, and exhaustively searching through…
This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood.…
Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in arithmetic and reasoning tasks, by instructing the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps.…
Length generalization, the ability to solve problems of longer sequences than those observed during training, poses a core challenge of Transformer-based large language models (LLM). Although existing studies have predominantly focused on…
State-of-the-art pretrained language models tend to perform below their capabilities when applied out-of-the-box on tasks that require understanding and working with numbers. Recent work suggests two main reasons for this: (1) popular…
Transformers struggle with length generalisation, displaying poor performance even on basic tasks. We test whether these limitations can be explained through two key failures of the self-attention mechanism. The first is the inability to…
Transformer-based masked language models such as BERT, trained on general corpora, have shown impressive performance on downstream tasks. It has also been demonstrated that the downstream task performance of such models can be improved by…
Despite the recent advances showing that a model pre-trained on large-scale source code data is able to gain appreciable generalization capability, it still requires a sizeable amount of data on the target task for fine-tuning. And the…
Transfer learning is a useful technique for achieving improved performance and reducing training costs by leveraging the knowledge gained from source tasks and applying it to target tasks. Assessing the effectiveness of transfer learning…
In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…
Multi-task learning and self-training are two common ways to improve a machine learning model's performance in settings with limited training data. Drawing heavily on ideas from those two approaches, we suggest transductive auxiliary task…
In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…
In large language model training, input documents are typically concatenated together and then split into sequences of equal length to avoid padding tokens. Despite its efficiency, the concatenation approach compromises data integrity -- it…
When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…
The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we…
Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…
While robot learning has demonstrated promising results for enabling robots to automatically acquire new skills, a critical challenge in deploying learning-based systems is scale: acquiring enough data for the robot to effectively…
Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…
Training large transformer models from scratch for a target task requires lots of data and is computationally demanding. The usual practice of transfer learning overcomes this challenge by initializing the model with weights of a pretrained…