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While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse real-world scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning,…
Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…
Enabling machine learning classifiers to defer their decision to a downstream expert when the expert is more accurate will ensure improved safety and performance. This objective can be achieved with the learning-to-defer framework which…
Within the scaling laws paradigm, which underpins the training of large neural networks like ChatGPT and Llama, we consider a supervised regression setting and establish the existance of a strong form of the model collapse phenomenon, a…
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…
Although Perplexity is a widely used performance metric for language models, the values are highly dependent upon the number of words in the corpus and is useful to compare performance of the same corpus only. In this paper, we propose a…
Our research demonstrates the significant benefits of using fine-tuning with explanations to enhance the performance of language models. Unlike prompting, which maintains the model's parameters, fine-tuning allows the model to learn and…
Word embeddings and pre-trained language models allow to build rich representations of text and have enabled improvements across most NLP tasks. Unfortunately they are very expensive to train, and many small companies and research groups…
Large Language Models are increasingly used as zero-shot classifiers in complex reasoning tasks. However, standard constrained decoding suffers from a phenomenon we define as Renormalization Bias. When a model is restricted to a small set…
This study evaluates the forecasting performance of recent language models (LLMs) on binary forecasting questions. We first introduce a novel dataset of over 600 binary forecasting questions, augmented with related news articles and their…
We present a systematic empirical study of small language models under strict compute constraints, analyzing how architectural choices and training budget interact to determine performance. Starting from a linear next-token predictor, we…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…
Recent works have argued that high-level semantic concepts are encoded "linearly" in the representation space of large language models. In this work, we study the origins of such linear representations. To that end, we introduce a simple…
Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are…
Deep learning models have achieved tremendous success in most of the industries in recent years. The evolution of these models has also led to an increase in the model size and energy requirement, making it difficult to deploy in production…
The surprising ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform well on complex reasoning with only few-shot chain-of-thought prompts is believed to emerge only in very large-scale models (100+ billion parameters). We show that such…
Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To…
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 addresses the challenges of efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) by exploring data efficiency and hyperparameter optimization. We investigate the minimum data required for effective fine-tuning and propose a novel…
A new language model for speech recognition inspired by linguistic analysis is presented. The model develops hidden hierarchical structure incrementally and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history - thus enabling the…