Related papers: Generalization v.s. Memorization: Tracing Language…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the…

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…

Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…

How can pretrained language models (PLMs) learn factual knowledge from the training set? We investigate the two most important mechanisms: reasoning and memorization. Prior work has attempted to quantify the number of facts PLMs learn, but…

We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context--a fundamental skill for various LLM applications, including in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation…

Recent pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieve promising results in existing abstractive summarization datasets. However, existing summarization benchmarks overlap in time with the standard pre-training corpora and finetuning datasets.…

Large language models (LLMs) cannot be trusted for economic forecasts during periods covered by their training data. Counterfactual forecasting ability is non-identified when the model has seen the realized values: any observed output is…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization across tasks, leading to increased interest in integrating speech with LLMs. These speech LLMs (SLLMs) typically use supervised fine-tuning to align speech with text-based…

The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the capacity to reconstruct and trace learned content from their training data under specific elicitation conditions, yet this capability does not manifest in standard generation contexts. This…

When do diffusion models reproduce their training data, and when are they able to generate samples beyond it? A practically relevant theoretical understanding of this interplay between memorization and generalization may significantly…

Many reasoning, planning, and problem-solving tasks share an intrinsic algorithmic nature: correctly simulating each step is a sufficient condition to solve them correctly. We collect pairs of naturalistic and synthetic reasoning tasks to…

Idioms have long posed a challenge due to their unique linguistic properties, which set them apart from other common expressions. While recent studies have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to handle idioms across various tasks, e.g.,…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Reasoning is a fundamental capability of AI agents. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities to perform reasoning tasks. However, numerous evaluations of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs have also showed some…

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…

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…

While systems designed for solving planning tasks vastly outperform Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain, they usually discard the rich semantic information embedded within task descriptions. In contrast, LLMs possess parametrised…

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training, remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length…