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Attention is foundational to large language models (LLMs), enabling different heads to have diverse focus on relevant input tokens. However, learned behaviors like attention sinks, where the first token receives the most attention despite…

This paper investigates the influence of cognitive biases on Large Language Models (LLMs) outputs. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation and availability biases, can distort user inputs through prompts, potentially leading to unfaithful…

Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Preference optimization has emerged as a popular and effective method for improving alignment, typically through training-time or prompt-based…

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) enable fully parallel token decoding but often remain impractical at inference time due to the many denoising iterations required to refine an information-free, fully masked initialization into…

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation for language tasks, they are not specifically designed for multimodal challenges. Training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), however, is resource-intensive and…

Pre-trained vision-language models are able to interpret visual concepts and language semantics. Prompt learning, a method of constructing prompts for text encoders or image encoders, elicits the potentials of pre-trained models and readily…

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual understanding. This impressive leap raises a compelling question: how can language models, initially trained solely on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in tackling various tasks based on human instructions, but studies reveal that they often struggle with tasks requiring reasoning, such as math or physics. This limitation…

Reliable AI systems require large language models (LLMs) to exhibit behaviors aligned with human preferences and values. However, most existing alignment approaches operate at training time and rely on additional high-quality data,…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in external, up-to-date information. However, recent advancements in context window size allow LLMs to process inputs of up to 128K tokens or…

This thesis provides methods and analysis of models which make progress on this goal. The techniques outlined are task agnostic, and should provide benefit when used with nearly any transformer LM. We introduce two new finetuning methods…

Code data has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear which aspects of code are most responsible. We investigate this question with a systematic, data-centric framework. We…

Large Language Models (LLMs) changed the way we design and interact with software systems. Their ability to process and extract information from text has drastically improved productivity in a number of routine tasks. Developers that want…

Pretraining language models directly on web-scale corpora is the de facto paradigm. We study an alternative where the model is initially exposed to abstract structured data to ease the subsequent acquisition of rich semantic knowledge, much…

Insensitivity to semantically-preserving variations of prompts (paraphrases) is crucial for reliable behavior and real-world deployment of large language models. However, language models exhibit significant performance degradation when…

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Mathematical reasoning serves as a crucial testbed for the intelligence of large language models (LLMs), and math word problems (MWPs) are a popular type of math problems. Most MWP datasets consist of problems containing only the necessary…

Concerns with the safety and reliability of applying large-language models (LLMs) in unpredictable real-world applications motivate this study, which examines how task phrasing can lead to presumptions in LLMs, making it difficult for them…

As software grows in complexity to accommodate diverse features and platforms, software bloating has emerged as a significant challenge, adversely affecting performance and security. However, existing approaches inadequately address the…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in supporting decision-making applications, particularly as personal assistants in the financial, healthcare, and legal domains. While prompt engineering strategies have enhanced the…