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Early in training, LMs can behave like n-gram models, but eventually they often learn tree-based syntactic rules and generalize hierarchically out of distribution (OOD). We study this shift using controlled grammar-learning tasks: question…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being applied in a wide array of settings, well beyond the typical language-oriented use cases. In particular, LLMs are increasingly used as a plug-and-play method for fitting data and generating…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, with post-training playing a crucial role in enhancing their reasoning capabilities. Among post-training paradigms, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used: it leverages…
Training data compositions for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly affect their downstream performance. However, a thorough data ablation study exploring large sets of candidate data mixtures is typically prohibitively expensive…
Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in NLP significantly, deploying them for downstream applications is still challenging due to cost, responsiveness, control, or concerns around privacy and security. As…
Acquiring and training on large-scale labeled data can be impractical due to cost constraints. Additionally, the use of small training datasets can result in considerable variability in model outcomes, overfitting, and learning of spurious…
Large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to help with writing formulas in spreadsheets, but resources on these formulas are scarce, impacting both the base performance of pre-trained models and limiting the ability to fine-tune them.…
Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…
By explaining how humans would solve a given task, human rationales can provide strong learning signal for neural language models (LMs). Explanation regularization (ER) aims to improve LM generalization by pushing the LM's machine…
Synthetically-generated data plays an increasingly larger role in training large language models. However, while synthetic data has been found to be useful, studies have also shown that without proper curation it can cause LLM performance…
Learned reweighting (LRW) approaches to supervised learning use an optimization criterion to assign weights for training instances, in order to maximize performance on a representative validation dataset. We pose and formalize the problem…
We study the generalization abilities of language models when translating natural language into formal specifications with complex semantics. In particular, we fine-tune language models on three datasets consisting of English sentences and…
When humans learn a new concept, they might ignore examples that they cannot make sense of at first, and only later focus on such examples, when they are more useful for learning. We propose incorporating this idea of tunable sensitivity…
The weak-to-strong generalization phenomenon is the driver for important machine learning applications including highly data-efficient learning and, most recently, performing superalignment. While decades of research have resulted in…
Weak-to-strong generalization refers to the phenomenon where a stronger model trained under supervision from a weaker one can outperform its teacher. While prior studies aim to explain this effect, most theoretical insights are limited to…
There is a growing need for models that are interpretable and have reduced energy and computational cost (e.g., in health care analytics and federated learning). Examples of algorithms to train such models include logistic regression and…
Finetuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can cause them to become emergently misaligned, giving stereotypically `evil' responses across diverse unrelated settings. Concerningly, a pre-registered survey of experts failed…
Selecting an effective training signal for machine learning tasks is difficult: expert annotations are expensive, and crowd-sourced annotations may not be reliable. Recent work has demonstrated that learning from a distribution over labels…
While fine-tuned language models perform well on many tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We…
This paper investigates the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). For a precisely defined yet tractable formulation, we choose the conceptually simple but technically complex task of constructing proofs in Boolean…