Related papers: Understanding the Role of Input Token Characters i…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that use subword tokenization schemes can succeed at a variety of language tasks that require character-level information, despite lacking explicit access to the character composition of tokens. Here,…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL…
How do language models learn to make predictions during pre-training? To study this, we extract learning curves from five autoregressive English language model pre-training runs, for 1M unseen tokens in context. We observe that the language…
Pre-training language models (LMs) on large-scale unlabeled text data makes the model much easier to achieve exceptional downstream performance than their counterparts directly trained on the downstream tasks. In this work, we study what…
Language models (LMs) have been reported to implicitly encode character-level information, despite not being explicitly provided during training. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain largely unexplored. To reveal the…
This work introduces an approach to assessing phrase break in ESL learners' speech with pre-trained language models (PLMs). Different with traditional methods, this proposal converts speech to token sequences, and then leverages the power…
Modern tokenizers employ deterministic algorithms to map text into a single "canonical" token sequence, yet the same string can be encoded as many non-canonical tokenizations using the tokenizer vocabulary. In this work, we investigate the…
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…
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…
Standard pretrained language models operate on sequences of subword tokens without direct access to the characters that compose each token's string representation. We probe the embedding layer of pretrained language models and show that…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performances on a wide range of natural language tasks. Yet, LLMs' successes have been largely restricted to tasks concerning words, sentences, or documents, and it remains…
Tokenization is an understudied and often neglected component of modern LLMs. Most published works use a single tokenizer for all experiments, often borrowed from another model, without performing ablations or analysis to optimize…
Tasks that require character-level reasoning, such as counting or locating characters within words, remain challenging for contemporary language models. A common conjecture is that language models' reliance on subword units, rather than…
Character-level language models obviate the need for separately trained tokenizers, but efficiency suffers from longer sequence lengths. Learning to combine character representations into tokens has made training these models more…
Large language models (LLMs) can spell out tokens character by character with high accuracy, yet they struggle with more complex character-level tasks, such as identifying compositional subcomponents within tokens. In this work, we…
Subword tokenization is an essential part of modern large language models (LLMs), yet its specific contributions to training efficiency and model performance remain poorly understood. In this work, we decouple the effects of subword…
Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…
The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…
Large language models (LLMs) trained with canonical tokenization exhibit surprising robustness to non-canonical inputs such as character-level tokenization, yet the mechanisms underlying this robustness remain unclear. We study this…
Recently, the development of pre-trained language models has brought natural language processing (NLP) tasks to the new state-of-the-art. In this paper we explore the efficiency of various pre-trained language models. We pre-train a list of…