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Pre-trained model representations have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in speech recognition, natural language processing, and other applications. Speech models, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers…
Recent research has explored how Language Models (LMs) can be used for feature representation and prediction in tabular machine learning tasks. This involves employing text serialization and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) techniques. Despite…
Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, seeks to design algorithms that can utilize previous experience to rapidly learn new skills or adapt to new environments. Representation learning -- a key tool for performing meta-learning -- learns a…
Progress in pre-trained language models has led to a surge of impressive results on downstream tasks for natural language understanding. Recent work on probing pre-trained language models uncovered a wide range of linguistic properties…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have started to demonstrate the ability to persuade humans, yet our understanding of how this dynamic transpires is limited. Recent work has used linear probes, lightweight tools for analyzing model…
This thesis addresses challenges related to data and parameter efficiency in neural language models, with a focus on representation analysis and the introduction of new optimization techniques. The first part examines the properties and…
Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate politically biased text. Yet, it remains unclear how such biases arise, making it difficult to design effective mitigation strategies. We hypothesize that these biases are rooted in the…
Large language models are increasingly applied to materials science, yet fundamental questions remain about their reliability and knowledge encoding. Evaluating 25 LLMs across four materials science tasks -- over 200 base and fine-tuned…
Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…
Decision Transformer (DT) has emerged as a promising class of algorithms in offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, leveraging pre-collected datasets and Transformer's capability to model long sequences. Recent works have demonstrated…
Faithful evaluation of language model capabilities is crucial for deriving actionable insights that can inform model development. However, rigorous causal evaluations in this domain face significant methodological challenges, including…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) often degrades when crucial information is in the middle of a long context, a "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon that mirrors the primacy and recency effects in human memory. We propose that this…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a linear regression model on a data domain of interest (target) given few samples. To aid learning, we are provided with a set of pre-trained regression models that are trained on…
Reasoning is an integral part of many tasks performed by language models (LMs). However, the effects of scaling model sizes and data on reasoning abilities at pretraining time remain understudied. To rigorously investigate this problem, we…
Understanding what defines a good representation in large language models (LLMs) is fundamental to both theoretical understanding and practical applications. In this paper, we investigate the quality of intermediate representations in…
Pre-trained language models (PLM) have marked a huge leap in neural dialogue modeling. While PLMs are pre-trained on large-scale text corpora, they are usually fine-tuned on scarce dialogue data with specific domain knowledge and dialogue…
The self-rationalising capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have been explored in restricted settings, using task/specific data sets. However, current LLMs do not (only) rely on specifically annotated data; nonetheless, they…
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in decision-making, but their reliability, especially in critical tasks like healthcare, is not well-established. Therefore, understanding how LLMs reason and make decisions is crucial for their…
Large language models leverage both parametric knowledge acquired during pretraining and in-context knowledge provided at inference time. Crucially, when these sources conflict, models arbitrate based on their internal confidence,…