Related papers: Overtrained Language Models Are Harder to Fine-Tun…

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automated code generation. LLMs rely on large and diverse datasets to learn syntax, semantics, and usage patterns of programming languages. For low-resource…

Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic…

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have recently achieved impressive results on reasoning benchmarks. Yet, growing evidence shows that these models often generate longer but ineffective chains of thought…

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of…

Most large language models are fine-tuned using either expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data which cannot guarantee performance in certain domains. We argue that although the web-crawled data often has formatting errors…

We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…

Language models typically tokenize raw text into sequences of subword identifiers from a predefined vocabulary, a process inherently sensitive to typographical errors, length variations, and largely oblivious to the internal structure of…

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Curriculum learning-organizing training data from easy to hard-has improved efficiency across machine learning domains, yet remains underexplored for language model pretraining. We present the first systematic investigation of curriculum…

Pre-training on a source task is usually expected to facilitate fine-tuning on similar downstream problems. In this work, we mathematically show that this naive intuition is not always true: excessive pre-training can computationally slow…

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…

Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). While numerous studies have examined the impact of factors such as data volume and model size on English models, the scaling…

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multilingual pretrained models shows promise for low-resource languages, but often suffers from misalignment of internal representations between languages. We hypothesize that even when the…

We demonstrate that explicitly aligning the pretraining objectives to the finetuning objectives in language model training significantly improves the finetuning task performance and reduces the minimum amount of finetuning examples…

Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown strong abilities in multilingual translations, without being explicitly trained on parallel corpora. It is interesting how the LLMs obtain their ability to…

Context: In the fast-paced evolution of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for tasks such as code generation, completion, analysis, and bug fixing. Ensuring the robustness of these models…

We propose that small pretrained foundational generative language models with millions of parameters can be utilized as a general learning framework for sequence-based tasks. Our proposal overcomes the computational resource, skill set, and…