Related papers: Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models
Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…
Continual learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs) is an evolving domain that focuses on developing efficient and sustainable training strategies to adapt models to emerging knowledge and achieve robustness in dynamic environments. Our…
Pre-training language models (LMs) on large-scale unlabeled text data makes the model much easier to achieve exceptional downstream performance than their counterparts directly trained on the downstream tasks. In this work, we study what…
While task-agnostic debiasing provides notable generalizability and reduced reliance on downstream data, its impact on language modeling ability and the risk of relearning social biases from downstream task-specific data remain as the two…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in a multitude of NLP tasks. However, the efficacy of such models to languages other than English is often limited. Prior works have shown that encoder-only models such as…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being applied in a wide array of settings, well beyond the typical language-oriented use cases. In particular, LLMs are increasingly used as a plug-and-play method for fitting data and generating…
How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families.…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
As open-weight large language models (LLMs) achieve ever more impressive performances across a wide range of tasks in English, practitioners aim to adapt these models to different languages. However, such language adaptation is often…
Given the prevalence of large language models (LLMs) and the prohibitive cost of training these models from scratch, dynamically forgetting specific knowledge e.g., private or proprietary, without retraining the model has become an…
Understanding whether and to what extent large language models (LLMs) have memorised training data has important implications for the reliability of their output and the privacy of their training data. In order to cleanly measure and…
Decision Transformer-based decision-making agents have shown the ability to generalize across multiple tasks. However, their performance relies on massive data and computation. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the forgetting…
In aligning large language models (LLMs), reward models have played an important role, but are standardly trained as discriminative models and rely only on labeled human preference data. In this paper, we explore methods that train reward…
Fine-tuning multilingual foundation models on specific languages often induces catastrophic forgetting, degrading performance on languages unseen in fine-tuning. While this phenomenon is widely-documented, the literature presents fragmented…
Inspired by the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting, we investigate the learning dynamics of neural networks as they train on single classification tasks. Our goal is to understand whether a related phenomenon occurs when data does not…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities…
Memory, a fundamental component of human cognition, exhibits adaptive yet fallible characteristics as illustrated by Schacter's memory "sins".These cognitive phenomena have been studied extensively in psychology and neuroscience, but the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…
Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…