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Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized…
Regularization and transfer learning are two popular techniques to enhance generalization on unseen data, which is a fundamental problem of machine learning. Regularization techniques are versatile, as they are task- and…
Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…
Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…
Instruction tuning (IT) achieves impressive zero-shot generalization results by training large language models (LLMs) on a massive amount of diverse tasks with instructions. However, how to select new tasks to improve the performance and…
Instruction tuning -- tuning large language models on instruction-output pairs -- is a promising technique for making models better adapted to the real world. Yet, the key factors driving the model's capability to understand and follow…
Language models suffer from various degenerate behaviors. These differ between tasks: machine translation (MT) exhibits length bias, while tasks like story generation exhibit excessive repetition. Recent work has attributed the difference…
The successful training of deep neural networks requires addressing challenges such as overfitting, numerical instabilities leading to divergence, and increasing variance in the residual stream. A common solution is to apply regularization…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
Changing how pre-trained models behave -- e.g., improving their performance on a downstream task or mitigating biases learned during pre-training -- is a common practice when developing machine learning systems. In this work, we propose a…
Transfer-learning and meta-learning are two effective methods to apply knowledge learned from large data sources to new tasks. In few-class, few-shot target task settings (i.e. when there are only a few classes and training examples…
Multi-task learning improves generalization, but when does it reduce the model capacity required to learn? We provide a systematic study of how joint training affects the learning transition, the minimum model size at which a task can be…
The superficial alignment hypothesis (SAH) posits that large language models learn most of their knowledge during pre-training, and that post-training merely surfaces this knowledge. The SAH, however, lacks a precise definition, which has…
Difficult problems, which often result in long reasoning traces, are widely recognized as key factors for enhancing the performance of reasoning models. However, such high-challenge problems are scarce, limiting the size of available…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are designed to extend Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities, yet in this work we observe a surprising phenomenon: VLMs can outperform their underlying LLMs on purely text-only tasks,…
Agents trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms are capable of performing highly complex tasks including locomotion in continuous environments. We investigate transferring the learning acquired in one task to a set of previously…
The Transformer model has revolutionized Natural Language Processing tasks such as Neural Machine Translation, and many efforts have been made to study the Transformer architecture, which increased its efficiency and accuracy. One potential…
Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models remain challenged by the task of long-sequence processing, because the computational cost of self-attention operations in transformers swells quadratically with the…
A significant effort has been made to train neural networks that replicate algorithmic reasoning, but they often fail to learn the abstract concepts underlying these algorithms. This is evidenced by their inability to generalize to data…