Related papers: Language Models "Grok" to Copy
We discuss two solvable grokking (generalisation beyond overfitting) models in a rule learning scenario. We show that grokking is a phase transition and find exact analytic expressions for the critical exponents, grokking probability, and…
We study whether transformers can learn to implicitly reason over parametric knowledge, a skill that even the most capable language models struggle with. Focusing on two representative reasoning types, composition and comparison, we…
Recent work on Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has highlighted the importance of language modeling in that it is certainly possible to achieve good performance by comparing the probabilities of the proposed edits. At the same time,…
Grokking, the phenomenon of delayed generalization, is often attributed to the depth and compositional structure of deep neural networks. We study grokking in one of the simplest possible settings: the learning of a linear model with…
Language Models (LMs) exhibit two distinct mechanisms for knowledge acquisition: in-weights learning (i.e., encoding information within the model weights) and in-context learning (ICL). Although these two modes offer complementary…
The evolving sophistication and intricacies of Large Language Models (LLMs) yield unprecedented advancements, yet they simultaneously demand considerable computational resources and incur significant costs. To alleviate these challenges,…
Multilingual language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities to transfer knowledge across languages, despite being trained without explicit cross-lingual supervision. We analyze the parameter spaces of three MLLMs to study…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…
Recent advancements in cognitive science and multi-round reasoning techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest that iterative thinking processes improve problem-solving performance in complex tasks. Inspired by this, approaches like…
In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…
Recent studies have uncovered intriguing phenomena in deep learning, such as grokking, double descent, and emergent abilities in large language models, which challenge human intuition and are crucial for a deeper understanding of neural…
Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…
Language models (LMs) have been instrumental for the rapid advance of natural language processing. This paper studies continual pre-training of LMs, in particular, continual domain-adaptive pre-training (or continual DAP-training). Existing…
Transformer language models can generate strikingly natural text by modeling language as a sequence of tokens, but by relying primarily on surface-level co-occurrence statistics they fail to form globally consistent latent representations…
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…
Transformers exhibit compositional reasoning on sequences not observed during training, a capability often attributed to in-context learning (ICL) and skill composition. We investigate this phenomenon using the Random Hierarchy Model (RHM),…
While LLMs have revolutionized the field of machine learning due to their high performance on a strikingly wide range of problems, they are also known to hallucinate false answers and underperform on less canonical versions of the same…
Motivated by the efficiency and rapid convergence of pre-trained models for solving downstream tasks, this paper extensively studies the impact of Continual Learning (CL) models as pre-trainers. In both supervised and unsupervised CL, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically start tabula rasa, without any prior knowledge of the environment, and without any prior skills. This however often leads to low sample efficiency, requiring a large amount of interaction…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…