Related papers: Tracing Multilingual Factual Knowledge Acquisition…

In our era of widespread false information, human fact-checkers often face the challenge of duplicating efforts when verifying claims that may have already been addressed in other countries or languages. As false information transcends…

Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…

What happens when a new piece of knowledge is introduced into the training data and how long does it last while a large language model (LM) continues to train? We investigate this question by injecting facts into LMs from a new probing…

Language models often struggle with handling factual knowledge, exhibiting factual hallucination issue. This makes it vital to evaluate the models' ability to recall its parametric knowledge about facts. In this study, we introduce a…

Large language models (LLMs) learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, such as detecting irregular plural noun subjects. However, because traditional evaluation methods (e.g., benchmarking) fail to reveal how models acquire these…

Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…

Language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize a great deal of factual knowledge contained in their training data. But when an LM generates an assertion, it is often difficult to determine where it learned this information and whether it…

Previous works show that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can capture factual knowledge. However, some analyses reveal that PLMs fail to perform it robustly, e.g., being sensitive to the changes of prompts when extracting factual…

Cross-lingual context retrieval (extracting contextual information in one language based on requests in another) is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs)…

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) offer promising opportunities for cross-lingual information access, yet their use of factual knowledge remains highly sensitive to the input language. Prior work has addressed this through English…

In this paper, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks. Through an analysis of LLMs' internal factual recall at each…

Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent…

Factual incorrectness in generated content is one of the primary concerns in ubiquitous deployment of large language models (LLMs). Prior findings suggest LLMs can (sometimes) detect factual incorrectness in their generated content (i.e.,…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a critical mechanism for enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), with self-consistency demonstrating notable promise in boosting performance. However, inherent linguistic…

Despite their strong ability to retrieve knowledge in English, current large language models show imbalance abilities in different languages. Two approaches are proposed to address this, i.e., multilingual pretraining and multilingual…

Neural language models are black-boxes--both linguistic patterns and factual knowledge are distributed across billions of opaque parameters. This entangled encoding makes it difficult to reliably inspect, verify, or update specific facts.…

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language…

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…