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Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive success on many software engineering tasks (e.g., code completion and code generation). By leveraging huge existing code corpora (e.g., GitHub),…

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is substantially influenced by the pretraining corpus, which consists of vast quantities of unsupervised data processed by the models. Despite its critical role in model performance, ensuring…

Domain adaptation aims to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generalize domain datasets unseen effectively during the training phase. However, factors such as the size of the model parameters and the scale of training data are general…

There are many cases where LLMs are used for specific tasks in a single domain. These usually require less general, but more domain-specific knowledge. Highly capable, general-purpose state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4 or…

Compact dual-encoder models are widely used for retrieval owing to their efficiency and scalability. However, such models often underperform compared to their Large Language Model (LLM)-based retrieval counterparts, likely due to their…

Effective document reranking is essential for improving search relevance across diverse applications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reranking due to their deep semantic understanding and reasoning, their high computational…

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…

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly affected by the quality and composition of their pre-training data, which is inherently diverse, spanning various languages, sources, and topics. Effectively integrating these…

Recent advances in NLP are brought by a range of large-scale pretrained language models (PLMs). These PLMs have brought significant performance gains for a range of NLP tasks, circumventing the need to customize complex designs for specific…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a…

This study aims to guide language model selection by investigating: 1) the necessity of finetuning versus zero-shot usage, 2) the benefits of domain-adjacent versus generic pretrained models, 3) the value of further domain-specific…

We introduce a scaling law for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) under fixed compute budgets that explicitly accounts for data composition. Conventional approaches measure training data solely by total tokens, yet the number of…

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…

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Foundational models with billions of parameters which have been trained on large corpora of data have demonstrated non-trivial skills in a variety of domains. However, due to their monolithic structure, it is challenging and expensive to…

Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) has gained attention from researchers due to its ability to unlock the potential of LLMs in following instructions. While instruction tuning offers advantages for facilitating the…

With instruction tuning, Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their ability to adhere to commands. Diverging from most works focusing on data mixing, our study concentrates on enhancing the model's capabilities from the perspective of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on…

Large pre-trained models can dramatically reduce the amount of task-specific data required to solve a problem, but they often fail to capture domain-specific nuances out of the box. The Web likely contains the information necessary to excel…