Related papers: Language Models "Grok" to Copy

Existing accounts of grokking explain the phenomena in terms of mechanistic frameworks such as circuit efficiency or lazy-to-rich transitions. However, despite a known dependence between grokking and model size, how model capacity shapes…

Long-context modeling is one of the critical capabilities of language AI for digesting and reasoning over complex information pieces. In practice, long-context capabilities are typically built into a pre-trained language model~(LM) through…

We propose that the grokking phenomenon, where the train loss of a neural network decreases much earlier than its test loss, can arise due to a neural network transitioning from lazy training dynamics to a rich, feature learning regime. To…

For humans, language production and comprehension is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of sentences. In natural language processing, past work has questioned how effectively neural sequence models like transformers capture this…

Most Transformer language models are primarily pretrained on English text, limiting their use for other languages. As the model sizes grow, the performance gap between English and other languages with fewer compute and data resources…

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Pre-trained language models (e.g. BART) have shown impressive results when fine-tuned on large summarization datasets. However, little is understood about this fine-tuning process, including what knowledge is retained from pre-training time…

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we…

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

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…

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…

Grokking, a delayed generalization in neural networks after perfect training performance, has been observed in Transformers and MLPs, but the components driving it remain underexplored. We show that embeddings are central to grokking:…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Standard Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training typically treats corpora as flattened token sequences, often overlooking the real-world context that humans naturally rely on to contextualize information. To bridge this gap, we introduce…

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…

Grokking, referring to the abrupt improvement in test accuracy after extended overfitting, offers valuable insights into the mechanisms of model generalization. Existing researches based on progress measures imply that grokking relies on…

In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…

Recent studies on transformer-based language models show that they can answer questions by reasoning over knowledge provided as part of the context (i.e., in-context reasoning). However, since the available knowledge is often not filtered…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive few-shot in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Still, we show that they are sometimes prone to a `copying bias', where they copy answers from provided examples instead of learning the…

We consider problems of making sequences of decisions to accomplish tasks, interacting via the medium of language. These problems are often tackled with reinforcement learning approaches. We find that these models do not generalize well…