Related papers: Characterizing Pattern Matching and Its Limits on …
The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…
Several studies have reported the inability of Transformer models to generalize compositionally, a key type of generalization in many NLP tasks such as semantic parsing. In this paper we explore the design space of Transformer models…
This paper updates the cognitive model, firstly by creating two systems and then unifying them over the same structure. It represents information at the semantic level only, where labelled patterns are aggregated into a 'type-set-match'…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable task generalization, solving tasks they were never explicitly trained on with only a few demonstrations. This raises a fundamental question: When can learning from a small set of tasks…
We study the error rate of LLMs on tasks like arithmetic that require a deterministic output, and repetitive processing of tokens drawn from a small set of alternatives. We argue that incorrect predictions arise when small errors in the…
Neural networks can be powerful function approximators, which are able to model high-dimensional feature distributions from a subset of examples drawn from the target distribution. Naturally, they perform well at generalizing within the…
We introduce benchmark signatures to characterize the capacity demands of LLM benchmarks and their overlaps. Signatures are sets of salient tokens from in-the-wild corpora whose model token perplexity, reflecting training exposure, predicts…
Linearization has emerged as a strategy for developing efficient language models (LMs). Starting from an existing Transformer-based LM, linearization replaces the attention component with computationally efficient subquadratic \textit{token…
Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…
The compositional generalization abilities of neural models have been sought after for human-like linguistic competence. The popular method to evaluate such abilities is to assess the models' input-output behavior. However, that does not…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have intensified the debate surrounding the fundamental nature of their reasoning capabilities. While achieving high performance on benchmarks such as GPQA and MMLU, these models exhibit…
Understanding reasoning in large language models is complicated by evaluations that conflate multiple reasoning types. We isolate analogical reasoning, where a model transfers an attribute between entities that share known properties, and…
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly due to the attention mechanism, but their quadratic complexity and linear memory demands limit their performance on long-context tasks. Recently, researchers introduced Mamba, an…
Adapter parameters provide a mechanism to modify the behavior of machine learning models and have gained significant popularity in the context of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. These parameters can be merged to support…
Skill composition is the ability to combine previously learned skills to solve new tasks. As neural networks acquire increasingly complex skills during their pretraining, it is not clear how successfully they can compose them. In this…
Intrinsic self-correction in Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently fails in open-ended reasoning tasks due to ``hallucination snowballing,'' a phenomenon in which models recursively justify early errors during free-text reflection. While…
One of the major open problems in machine learning is to characterize generalization in the overparameterized regime, where most traditional generalization bounds become inconsistent even for overparameterized linear regression. In many…
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for many AI problems and exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. Compositional ability, solving unseen complex tasks that combine two or more simple tasks, is an…
What makes large language models (LLMs) impressive is also what makes them hard to evaluate: their diversity of uses. To evaluate these models, we must understand the purposes they will be used for. We consider a setting where these…
Model merging unifies independently fine-tuned LLMs from the same base, enabling reuse and integration of parallel development efforts without retraining. However, in practice we observe that merging does not always succeed: certain…