Related papers: What Do Learning Dynamics Reveal About Generalizat…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

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…

Memorization in large language models (LLMs) makes them vulnerable to data extraction attacks. While pre-training memorization has been extensively studied, fewer works have explored its impact in fine-tuning, particularly for LoRA…

We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) distinguish between memorization and generalization at the neuron level. Through carefully designed tasks, we identify distinct neuron subsets responsible for each behavior. Experiments on…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in natural language processing but are prone to memorizing portions of their training data, which can compromise evaluation metrics, raise privacy concerns, and limit…

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…

Continual learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs) is an evolving domain that focuses on developing efficient and sustainable training strategies to adapt models to emerging knowledge and achieve robustness in dynamic environments. Our…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great capabilities in various tasks but also exhibited memorization of training data, raising tremendous privacy and copyright concerns. While prior works have studied memorization during…

A machine learning (ML) system must learn not only to match the output of a target function on a training set, but also to generalize to novel situations in order to yield accurate predictions at deployment. In most practical applications,…

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they also exhibit memorization of their training data. This phenomenon raises critical questions about model behavior, privacy risks,…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve good performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks, yet could also make basic reasoning mistakes. This contrasting behavior is puzzling when it comes to understanding the mechanisms behind LLMs'…

We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive corpora with billions of parameters, show unprecedented performance in various fields. Though surprised by their excellent performances, researchers also noticed some special behaviors of…

This paper presents the first study of grokking in practical LLM pretraining. Specifically, we investigate when an LLM memorizes the training data, when its generalization on downstream tasks starts to improve, and what happens if there is…

Despite their wide adoption, the underlying training and memorization dynamics of very large language models is not well understood. We empirically study exact memorization in causal and masked language modeling, across model sizes and…