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As the application space of language models continues to evolve, a natural question to ask is how we can quickly adapt models to new tasks. We approach this classic question from a continual learning perspective, in which we aim to continue…

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning…

Increasing model size has unlocked a dazzling array of capabilities in modern language models. At the same time, even frontier models remain vulnerable to jailbreaks and prompt injections, despite concerted efforts to make them robust. As…

Artificial intelligence (AI) for software engineering (SE) tasks has recently achieved promising performance. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the pre-trained language model truly understands those SE tasks such as code search,…

Multi-task post-training of large language models (LLMs) is typically performed by mixing datasets from different tasks and optimizing them jointly. This approach implicitly assumes that all tasks contribute gradients of similar magnitudes;…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in educational settings. These applications expand beyond English, though current LLMs remain primarily English-centric. In this work, we ascertain if their use in education…

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…

Keeping the performance of language technologies optimal as time passes is of great practical interest. We study temporal effects on model performance on downstream language tasks, establishing a nuanced terminology for such discussion and…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written…

Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills…

The pursuit of leaderboard rankings in Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a fundamental paradox: models excel at standardized tests while failing to demonstrate genuine language understanding and adaptability. Our systematic analysis…

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

The success of ChatGPT has recently attracted numerous efforts to replicate it, with instruction-tuning strategies being a key factor in achieving remarkable results. Instruction-tuning not only significantly enhances the model's…

In this work, we reimagine classical probing to evaluate knowledge transfer from simple source to more complex target tasks. Instead of probing frozen representations from a complex source task on diverse simple target probing tasks (as…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated multilingual capabilities, yet they are mostly English-centric due to the imbalanced training corpora. While prior works have leveraged this bias to enhance multilingual performance through…

Developmental psychologists have argued about when cognitive capacities such as language understanding or theory of mind emerge. These debates often hinge on the concept of "task demands" -- the auxiliary challenges associated with…

We develop a methodology for analyzing language model task performance at the individual example level based on training data density estimation. Experiments with paraphrasing as a controlled intervention on finetuning data demonstrate that…

Pre-training has achieved remarkable success when transferred to downstream tasks. In machine learning, we care about not only the good performance of a model but also its behavior under reasonable shifts of condition. The same philosophy…

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on the huge amount of pre-training data learned in the pre-training phase. The opacity of the pre-training process and the training data causes the results of many benchmark tests…