Related papers: Adaptation Odyssey in LLMs: Why Does Additional Pr…
Despite their outstanding performance, large language models (LLMs) suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a…
We explore how continued pre-training on domain-specific corpora influences large language models, revealing that training on the raw corpora endows the model with domain knowledge, but drastically hurts its prompting ability for question…
While metrics available during pre-training, such as perplexity, correlate well with model performance at scaling-laws studies, their predictive capacities at a fixed model size remain unclear, hindering effective model selection and…
Large language models are pre-trained on ever-growing token budgets under the assumption that better pre-training performance translates to improved downstream models. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that extended…
How does the natural evolution of context paragraphs affect question answering in generative Large Language Models (LLMs)? To investigate this, we propose a framework for curating naturally evolved, human-edited variants of reading passages…
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on web-scale text corpora have been shown to capture world knowledge in their parameters. However, the mechanism by which language models store different types of knowledge is poorly understood. In this…
Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in text summarization, yet their performance often falls short when applied to specialized domains that differ from their original pre-training distribution. While…
Domain-adaptive pre-training (or DA-training for short), also known as post-training, aims to train a pre-trained general-purpose language model (LM) using an unlabeled corpus of a particular domain to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the…
Large volumes of text data have contributed significantly to the development of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. This data is typically acquired by scraping the internet, leading to pretraining datasets comprised of noisy web…
Large Language Models (LLMs), being generic task solvers, are versatile. However, despite the vast amount of data they are trained on, there are speculations about their adaptation capabilities to a new domain. Additionally, the simple…
Quality pretraining data is often seen as the key to high-performance language models. However, progress in understanding pretraining data has been slow due to the costly pretraining runs required for data selection experiments. We present…
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle on out-of-domain datasets like healthcare focused text. We explore specialized pre-training to adapt smaller LLMs to different healthcare datasets. Three methods are assessed:…
Language models pretrained on text from a wide variety of sources form the foundation of today's NLP. In light of the success of these broad-coverage models, we investigate whether it is still helpful to tailor a pretrained model to the…
The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…
In the U.S. judicial system, a widespread approach to legal interpretation entails assessing how a legal text would be understood by an `ordinary' speaker of the language. Recent scholarship has proposed that legal practitioners leverage…
Handling long-context inputs is crucial for large language models (LLMs) in tasks such as extended conversations, document summarization, and many-shot in-context learning. While recent approaches have extended the context windows of LLMs…
Consistency is a key requirement of high-quality translation. It is especially important to adhere to pre-approved terminology and adapt to corrected translations in domain-specific projects. Machine translation (MT) has achieved…
Online education platforms, leveraging the internet to distribute education resources, seek to provide convenient education but often fall short in real-time communication with students. They often struggle to address the diverse obstacles…
Large language models are powerful but costly. We ask whether meta-learning can make the pretraining of small language models not only better but also more interpretable. We integrate first-order MAML with subset-masked LM pretraining,…