Related papers: Understanding Finetuning for Factual Knowledge Ext…
Instruction Tuning (IT), the process of training large language models (LLMs) using instruction-response pairs, has emerged as the predominant method for transforming base pre-trained LLMs into open-domain conversational agents. While IT…
Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…
Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. While unintuitive from a classic view of LMs, recent work has shown that the truth…
In many scenarios, named entity recognition (NER) models severely suffer from unlabeled entity problem, where the entities of a sentence may not be fully annotated. Through empirical studies performed on synthetic datasets, we find two…
Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these…
We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for…
LLMs' sources of knowledge are data snapshots containing factual information about entities collected at different timestamps and from different media types (e.g. wikis, social media, etc.). Such unstructured knowledge is subject to change…
What happens when a new piece of knowledge is introduced into the training data and how long does it last while a large language model (LM) continues to train? We investigate this question by injecting facts into LMs from a new probing…
Factuality evaluation aims to detect factual errors produced by language models (LMs) and hence guide the development of more factual models. Towards this goal, we train a factuality evaluator, FenCE, that provides LM generators with…
The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a classifier that can recognize unseen classes from limited support data with labels. A common practice for this task is to train a model on the base set first and then transfer to novel classes…
Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…
Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) significantly enhances the zero-shot capabilities of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). While coding data is known to boost LLM reasoning abilities during pretraining, its role in activating internal…
Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…
Instruct models, obtained from various instruction tuning or post-training steps, are commonly deemed superior and more usable than their base counterpart. While the model gains instruction following ability, instruction tuning may lead to…
Understanding the process of learning in neural networks is crucial for improving their performance and interpreting their behavior. This can be approximately understood by asking how a model's output is influenced when we fine-tune on a…
The rapid proliferation of generative AI, especially large language models, has led to their integration into a variety of applications. A key phenomenon known as weak-to-strong generalization - where a strong model trained on a weak…
Instruction finetuning is standard practice for improving LLM performance, yet it remains unclear whether it enhances reasoning or merely induces surface-level pattern matching. We investigate this by evaluating base and instruction-tuned…
Recently, there has been an explosion of large language models created through fine-tuning with data from larger models. These small models able to produce outputs that appear qualitatively similar to significantly larger models. However,…
Pre-trained multilingual language models show significant performance gains for zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer on a wide range of natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Previously, for zero-shot cross-lingual evaluation,…