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Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…
In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more…
Large language models are able to learn new tasks in context, where they are provided with instructions and a few annotated examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is dependent on the provided context, and the…
Fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. It is commonly believed that fine-tuning can surpass ICL given sufficient training samples as it allows the…
Current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods build adapters widely agnostic of the context of downstream task to learn, or the context of important knowledge to maintain. As a result, there is often a performance gap compared to…
We present symbol tuning - finetuning language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels (e.g., "positive/negative sentiment") are replaced with arbitrary symbols (e.g., "foo/bar"). Symbol tuning leverages the…
We study the in-context learning dynamics of large language models (LLMs) using three instrumental learning tasks adapted from cognitive psychology. We find that LLMs update their beliefs in an asymmetric manner and learn more from…
Finetuning provides a scalable and cost-effective means of customizing language models for specific tasks or response styles, with greater reliability than prompting or in-context learning. In contrast, the conventional wisdom is that…
In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights: this is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024)…
Language model fine-tuning is essential for modern natural language processing, but is computationally expensive and time-consuming. Further, the effectiveness of fine-tuning is limited by the inclusion of training examples that negatively…
We measure the performance of in-context learning as a function of task novelty and difficulty for open and closed questions. For that purpose, we created a novel benchmark consisting of hard scientific questions, each paired with a context…
While fine-tuning LLMs on NLI corpora improves their inferential performance, the underlying mechanisms driving this improvement remain largely opaque. In this work, we conduct a series of experiments to investigate what LLMs actually learn…
As the modern tools of choice for text understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) are expected to accurately output answers by leveraging the input context. This requires LLMs to possess both context-faithfulness and factual…
Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models'…
In-Context Learning (ICL) and Instruction Tuning (IT) are two primary paradigms of adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream applications. However, they are significantly different. In ICL, a set of demonstrations are provided at…
Language models, characterized by their black-box nature, often hallucinate and display sensitivity to input perturbations, causing concerns about trust. To enhance trust, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive understanding of the…
Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…
In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…
Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…
Language models have emerged as powerful predictors of the viability of biological sequences. During training these models learn the rules of the grammar obeyed by sequences of amino acids or nucleotides. Once trained, these models can take…