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Related papers: Unforgettable Generalization in Language Models

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Over-parameterized deep neural networks are able to achieve excellent training accuracy while maintaining a small generalization error. It has also been found that they are able to fit arbitrary labels, and this behaviour is referred to as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Futong Liu , Tao Lin , Martin Jaggi

Fine-tuning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on task-specific data is an effective way to improve performance on downstream applications. However, such adaptation often leads to a degradation in generalization on pretrained tasks, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hyeontaek Hwang , Nguyen Dinh Son , Daeyoung Kim

Recent unlearning methods for LLMs are vulnerable to relearning attacks: knowledge believed-to-be-unlearned re-emerges by fine-tuning on a small set of (even seemingly-unrelated) examples. We study this phenomenon in a controlled setting…

Through their transfer learning abilities, highly-parameterized large pre-trained language models have dominated the NLP landscape for a multitude of downstream language tasks. Though linguistically proficient, the inability of these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Mandar Sharma , Nikhil Muralidhar , Naren Ramakrishnan

The advent of transformer-based architectures and large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Since these LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data from the web and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Arkadeep Baksi , Rahul Singh , Tarun Joshi

Recently, the pretrain-finetune paradigm has become a cornerstone in various deep learning areas. While in general the pre-trained model would promote both effectiveness and efficiency of downstream tasks fine-tuning, studies have shown…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Chunyang Jiang , Chi-min Chan , Yiyang Cai , Yulong Liu , Wei Xue , Yike Guo

Despite attaining high empirical generalization, the sharpness of models trained with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) do not always correlate with generalization error. Instead of viewing SAM as minimizing sharpness to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Ankit Vani , Frederick Tung , Gabriel L. Oliveira , Hossein Sharifi-Noghabi

Over the past decades, researchers and ML practitioners have come up with better and better ways to build, understand and improve the quality of ML models, but mostly under the key assumption that the training data is distributed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Yeounoh Chung , Peter J. Haas , Eli Upfal , Tim Kraska

Machine unlearning is a process to remove specific data points from a trained model while maintaining the performance on the retain data, addressing privacy or legal requirements. Despite its importance, existing unlearning evaluations tend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yongwoo Kim , Sungmin Cha , Donghyun Kim

Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., the language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Zhaochen Su , Zecheng Tang , Xinyan Guan , Juntao Li , Lijun Wu , Min Zhang

Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact be favorable to learning. We introduce "forget-and-relearn" as a powerful paradigm for shaping the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Hattie Zhou , Ankit Vani , Hugo Larochelle , Aaron Courville

We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can predict whether they will succeed on a given task and whether their predictions improve as they progress through multi-step tasks. We also investigate whether LLMs can learn from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Casey O. Barkan , Sid Black , Oliver Sourbut

Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Tianyang Xu , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Yohei Oseki , Ryan Cotterell , Alex Warstadt

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable breadth of knowledge, yet their ability to reason about computational processes remains poorly understood. Closing this gap matters for practitioners who rely on LLMs to guide algorithm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath , Tejas Melkote

Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Tyler A. Chang , Benjamin K. Bergen

Large language models (LLMs) often require vast amounts of text to effectively acquire new knowledge. While continuing pre-training on large corpora or employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven successful, updating an LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Hugo Abonizio , Thales Almeida , Roberto Lotufo , Rodrigo Nogueira

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated ability to perform numerical reasoning by extrapolating from a few examples in few-shot settings. However, the extent to which this extrapolation relies on robust reasoning is unclear. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Yasaman Razeghi , Robert L. Logan , Matt Gardner , Sameer Singh

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have recently gained considerable attention due to the powerful reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Existing research predominantly focuses on enhancing the task performance of these agents in diverse…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dayong Ye , Tainqing Zhu , Congcong Zhu , Feng He , Qi He , Shang Wang , Bo Liu , Wanlei Zhou

We show that large language models (LLMs) can be adapted to be generalizable policies for embodied visual tasks. Our approach, called Large LAnguage model Reinforcement Learning Policy (LLaRP), adapts a pre-trained frozen LLM to take as…