English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Syntax Without Planting Trees: Understand…

200 papers

Grokking is the intriguing phenomenon where a model learns to generalize long after it has fit the training data. We show both analytically and numerically that grokking can surprisingly occur in linear networks performing linear tasks in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-06 Noam Levi , Alon Beck , Yohai Bar-Sinai

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas

Understanding why trained Transformers generalize well is a fundamental problem in modern machine learning theory, and complexity-based generalization bounds provide a principled way to study this question. While existing norm-based bounds…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Mana Sakai , Masaaki Imaizumi

Humans can reason compositionally whilst grounding language utterances to the real world. Recent benchmarks like ReaSCAN use navigation tasks grounded in a grid world to assess whether neural models exhibit similar capabilities. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Ankur Sikarwar , Arkil Patel , Navin Goyal

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Pietro Morerio , Ruggero Ragonesi , Vittorio Murino

Modern distributed networks, notably transformers, acquire a remarkable ability (termed `in-context learning') to adapt their computation to input statistics, such that a fixed network can be applied to data from a broad range of systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Cole Gibson , Wenping Cui , Gautam Reddy

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing by demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse tasks. This study investigates the impact of the parameter initialization scale on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yao , Zhongwang Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Much recent work suggests that incorporating syntax information from dependency trees can improve task-specific transformer models. However, the effect of incorporating dependency tree information into pre-trained transformer models (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-28 Devendra Singh Sachan , Yuhao Zhang , Peng Qi , William Hamilton

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Elron Bandel , Yoav Goldberg , Yanai Elazar

Generalization in generative modeling is defined as the ability to learn an underlying distribution from a finite dataset and produce novel samples, with evaluation largely driven by held-out performance and perceived sample quality. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jerome Garnier-Brun , Luca Biggio , Davide Beltrame , Marc Mézard , Luca Saglietti

Large language models often struggle with length generalization and solving complex problem instances beyond their training distribution. We present a self-improvement approach where models iteratively generate and learn from their own…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Nayoung Lee , Ziyang Cai , Avi Schwarzschild , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Human conversations can evolve in many different ways, creating challenges for automatic understanding and summarization. Goal-oriented conversations often have meaningful sub-dialogue structure, but it can be highly domain-dependent. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-18 Bo-Ru Lu , Yushi Hu , Hao Cheng , Noah A. Smith , Mari Ostendorf

Generative models for dialog systems have gained much interest because of the recent success of RNN and Transformer based models in tasks like question answering and summarization. Although the task of dialog response generation is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Bishal Santra , Potnuru Anusha , Pawan Goyal

Designers of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems have begun to employ tree-structured translation models. Systems involving tree-structured translation models tend to be complex. This article aims to reduce the conceptual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2007-05-23 I. Dan Melamed , Wei Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Soma Sato , Ryohei Sasano

Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Shunjie Wang , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Juyong Kim , Pradeep Ravikumar , Joshua Ainslie , Santiago Ontañón

Unsupervised meta-learning aims to learn feature representations from unsupervised datasets that can transfer to downstream tasks with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to unsupervised meta-learning that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Anna Vettoruzzo , Lorenzo Braccaioli , Joaquin Vanschoren , Marlena Nowaczyk