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In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
Parities have become a standard benchmark for evaluating learning algorithms. Recent works show that regular neural networks trained by gradient descent can efficiently learn degree $k$ parities on uniform inputs for constant $k$, but fail…
To what extent can a neural network systematically reason over symbolic facts? Evidence suggests that large pre-trained language models (LMs) acquire some reasoning capacity, but this ability is difficult to control. Recently, it has been…
Transformer architectures are the backbone of most modern language models, but understanding the inner workings of these models still largely remains an open problem. One way that research in the past has tackled this problem is by…
Large-scale transformer models have shown remarkable performance in language modelling tasks. However, such models feature billions of parameters, leading to difficulties in their deployment and prohibitive training costs from scratch. To…
Recent successes of reinforcement learning (RL) in training large reasoning models motivate the question of whether self-training - the process where a model learns from its own judgments - can be sustained within RL. In this work, we study…
Machine learning explorations can make significant inroads into solving difficult problems in pure mathematics. One advantage of this approach is that mathematical datasets do not suffer from noise, but a challenge is the amount of data…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in various natural language processing areas, but they demand high computation resources which limits their deployment in real-world. Distillation is one technique to solve…
Children acquire language despite being exposed to several orders of magnitude less data than large language models require. Meta-learning has been proposed as a way to integrate human-like learning biases into neural-network architectures,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational…
The transformer architecture has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modern artificial intelligence, among which the capability of implicitly learning an internal model during inference time is widely believed to play a key role in the…
Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup,…
In this work, we explore whether modeling recurrence into the Transformer architecture can both be beneficial and efficient, by building an extremely simple recurrent module into the Transformer. We compare our model to baselines following…
Despite their original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, especially Transformer, are often perceived as not learning interpretable word alignments. In this paper, we show that NMT models…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, the potential harms from deceptive behavior underlie the need for faithfully interpreting their decision-making. While traditional probing methods have…
Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…
Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…
It is believed that Gradient Descent (GD) induces an implicit bias towards good generalization in training machine learning models. This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of GD for the matrix sensing problem, whose goal…
We learn recurrent neural network optimizers trained on simple synthetic functions by gradient descent. We show that these learned optimizers exhibit a remarkable degree of transfer in that they can be used to efficiently optimize a broad…