Related papers: What Do Learning Dynamics Reveal About Generalizat…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in question answering (QA), but metrics for assessing their reliance on memorization versus retrieval remain underdeveloped. Moreover, while finetuned models are…

We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is mixed regarding whether training on easier or harder data…

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various domains. However, effective decision-making relies heavily on strong reasoning abilities. Reasoning is the foundation for…

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Memorization, or the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to output entire sequences from their training data verbatim, is a key concern for safely deploying language models. In particular, it is vital to minimize a model's memorization…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often evaluated against ideals of perfect Bayesian inference, yet growing evidence suggests that their in-context reasoning exhibits systematic forgetting of past information. Rather than viewing this…

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…

Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…

The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few…

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as effective action policies for sequential decision-making (SDM) tasks due to their extensive prior knowledge. However, this broad yet general knowledge is often insufficient for specific…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prevalent in modern applications but often memorize training data, leading to privacy breaches and copyright issues. Existing research has mainly focused on posthoc analyses, such as extracting memorized…