Related papers: How Post-Training Reshapes LLMs: A Mechanistic Vie…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…
The evaluation and post-training of large language models (LLMs) rely on supervision, but strong supervision for difficult tasks is often unavailable, especially when evaluating frontier models. In such cases, models are demonstrated to…
Large language models (LLMs) are the result of a massive experiment in bottom-up, data-driven reverse engineering of language at scale. Despite their utility in a number of downstream NLP tasks, ample research has shown that LLMs are…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in natural language processing, but their underlying mechanisms are often misunderstood. Despite exhibiting coherent answers and apparent reasoning behaviors, LLMs rely on…
Pre-training language models (LMs) on large-scale unlabeled text data makes the model much easier to achieve exceptional downstream performance than their counterparts directly trained on the downstream tasks. In this work, we study what…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…
Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to…
Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate vast amounts of knowledge but still remain vulnerable to external misinformation. Existing research mainly studied this susceptibility behavior in a single-turn setting. However, belief can change…
Large Language Models are known to capture real-world knowledge, allowing them to excel in many downstream tasks. Despite recent advances, these models are still prone to what are commonly known as hallucinations, causing them to emit…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet recent findings reveal that their deeper layers often contribute minimally and can be pruned without affecting overall performance. While some view this as an opportunity…
While fine-tuning is the standard for injecting factual knowledge into large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms enabling reliable fact recall via unseen queries remain poorly understood. Common two-stage training strategies, which…
Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…
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 language models (LMs) have rapidly become a mainstay in Natural Language Processing. These models are known to acquire rich linguistic knowledge from training on large amounts of text. In this paper, we investigate if pre-training on…
The veracity of a factoid is largely independent of the language it is written in. However, language models are inconsistent in their ability to answer the same factual question across languages. This raises questions about how LLMs…
Large language models (LLMs) learn a vast amount of knowledge during pretraining, but they are often oblivious to the source(s) of such knowledge. We investigate the problem of intrinsic source citation, where LLMs are required to cite the…
Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…
Recent work exploring the capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to act as general pattern machines by completing complex token sequences representing a wide array of tasks, including…
Pre-trained transformer language models have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, recent research has suggested that phrase-level representations in these models reflect heavy influences of lexical content, but…
Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the limitations of relying solely on their parameters to encode a wealth of world…