Related papers: Establishing a Scale for Kullback-Leibler Divergen…
Prompt sensitivity, which refers to how strongly the output of a large language model (LLM) depends on the exact wording of its input prompt, raises concerns among users about the LLM's stability and reliability. In this work, we consider…
Language modeling has shifted in recent years from a distribution over strings to prediction models with textual inputs and outputs for general-purpose tasks. This position paper highlights the often overlooked implications of this shift…
Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…
While large models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest, such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic problems, are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs).…
We establish two correspondences between reverse-mode automatic differentiation (backpropagation at a given forward-pass point) and compositions of projection maps in Kullback--Leibler (KL) geometry. In both settings, message passing…
Recognizing subtle historical patterns is central to modeling and forecasting problems in time series analysis. Here we introduce and develop a new approach to quantify deviations in the underlying hidden generators of observed data…
Language models have emerged as powerful predictors of the viability of biological sequences. During training these models learn the rules of the grammar obeyed by sequences of amino acids or nucleotides. Once trained, these models can take…
We show that the $f$-divergence between any two densities of potentially different location-scale families can be reduced to the calculation of the $f$-divergence between one standard density with another location-scale density. It follows…
This study investigates gender bias in large language models (LLMs) by comparing their gender perception to that of human respondents, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and a 50% no-bias benchmark. We created a new evaluation set using…
This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…
Diffusion models are a new class of generative models that revolve around the estimation of the score function associated with a stochastic differential equation. Subsequent to its acquisition, the approximated score function is then…
We show that a language model's ability to predict text is tightly linked to the breadth of its embedding space: models that spread their contextual representations more widely tend to achieve lower perplexity. Concretely, we find that…
Probing techniques for large language models (LLMs) have primarily focused on English, overlooking the vast majority of the world's languages. In this paper, we extend these probing methods to a multilingual context, investigating the…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations such as unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that…
In this paper, we study the strong consistency of a bias reduced kernel density estimator and derive a strongly con- sistent Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) estimator. As application, we formulate a goodness-of-fit test and an…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs significant cost; hence, any strategy that accelerates model convergence is helpful. In this paper, we investigate the ability of a simple idea checkpoint averaging along the trajectory of a…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face…
In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE)…
Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…
We propose a statistical framework built on latent variable modeling for scaling laws of large language models (LLMs). Our work is motivated by the rapid emergence of numerous new LLM families with distinct architectures and training…