Related papers: Improving Instruct Models for Free: A Study on Par…

Self-supervised pretraining has made few-shot learning possible for many NLP tasks. But the pretraining objectives are not typically adapted specifically for in-context few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose to use self-supervision in…

Going beyond mere fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs), learnable prompt tuning has emerged as a promising, resource-efficient alternative. Despite their potential, effectively learning prompts faces the following challenges: (i)…

We demonstrate that co-training (Blum & Mitchell, 1998) can improve the performance of prompt-based learning by using unlabeled data. While prompting has emerged as a promising paradigm for few-shot and zero-shot learning, it is often…

Finetuning language models on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions has been shown to improve model performance and generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper we explore instruction finetuning with a particular focus on (1)…

In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…

Fine-tuning is known to improve NLP models by adapting an initial model trained on more plentiful but less domain-salient examples to data in a target domain. Such domain adaptation is typically done using one stage of fine-tuning. We…

Instruction tuning -- supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs -- is a key step in making pre-trained large language models (LLMs) instructable. Meanwhile, LLMs perform multitask learning during their pre-training, acquiring…

Fine-tuning is arguably the most straightforward way to tailor a pre-trained model (e.g., a foundation model) to downstream applications, but it also comes with the risk of losing valuable knowledge the model had learned in pre-training.…

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning…

Recent work has provided indirect evidence that pretraining language models on code improves the ability of models to track state changes of discourse entities expressed in natural language. In this work, we systematically test this claim…

In this paper, we introduce the Instruction Following Score (IFS), a metric that detects language models' ability to follow instructions. The metric has a dual purpose. First, IFS can be used to distinguish between base and instruct models.…

Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors…

Machine learning models are often used at test-time subject to constraints and trade-offs not present at training-time. For example, a computer vision model operating on an embedded device may need to perform real-time inference, or a…

The capacity of meta-learning algorithms to quickly adapt to a variety of tasks, including ones they did not experience during meta-training, has been a key factor in the recent success of these methods on few-shot learning problems. This…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT). However, current LLM-based MT systems are brittle: their effectiveness highly depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra…

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Instruction-tuning language models has become a crucial step in aligning them for general use. Typically, this process involves extensive training on large datasets, incurring high training costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel…

When training data is scarce, it is common to make use of a feature extractor that has been pre-trained on a large base dataset, either by fine-tuning its parameters on the ``target'' dataset or by directly adopting its representation as…

This work investigates whether small-scale LMs can benefit from instruction tuning. We compare conversational and question-answering instruction tuning datasets, applied either in a merged or sequential curriculum, using decoder-only models…

GPT-3 can perform numerous tasks when provided a natural language prompt that contains a few training examples. We show that this type of few-shot learning can be unstable: the choice of prompt format, training examples, and even the order…