Related papers: Linear Representation Transferability Hypothesis: …
We introduce Masked Trajectory Models (MTM) as a generic abstraction for sequential decision making. MTM takes a trajectory, such as a state-action sequence, and aims to reconstruct the trajectory conditioned on random subsets of the same…
Representation steering offers a lightweight mechanism for controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by intervening on internal activations at inference time. Most existing methods rely on a single global steering direction,…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has empirically shown its data representation learnability in many downstream tasks. There are only a few theoretical works on data representation learnability, and many of those focus on final data…
Pre-trained deep image representations are useful for post-training tasks such as classification through transfer learning, image retrieval, and object detection. Data augmentations are a crucial aspect of pre-training robust…
How do neural language models acquire a language's structure when trained for next-token prediction? We address this question by deriving theoretical scaling laws for neural network performance on synthetic datasets generated by the Random…
There is growing evidence that independently trained AI systems come to represent the world in the same way. In other words, independently trained embeddings from text, vision, audio, and neural signals share an underlying geometry. We call…
A commonly accepted hypothesis is that models with higher accuracy on Imagenet perform better on other downstream tasks, leading to much research dedicated to optimizing Imagenet accuracy. Recently this hypothesis has been challenged by…
Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…
Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks. Despite the models only seeing text in training, several recent studies suggest that LLM representations implicitly capture aspects of the underlying…
Learning informative representations of data is one of the primary goals of deep learning, but there is still little understanding as to what representations a neural network actually learns. To better understand this, subspace match was…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method for controlling language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although effective on average, steering effect sizes vary across samples and are unreliable for…
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…
Despite the recent success of deep neural networks in natural language processing (NLP), their interpretability remains a challenge. We analyze the representations learned by neural machine translation models at various levels of…
With the emergence of large-scale pre-trained neural networks, methods to adapt such "foundation" models to data-limited downstream tasks have become a necessity. Fine-tuning, preference optimization, and transfer learning have all been…
Decomposing a deep neural network's learned representations into interpretable features could greatly enhance its safety and reliability. To better understand features, we adopt a geometric perspective, viewing them as a learned coordinate…
Much of the knowledge encoded in transformer language models (LMs) may be expressed in terms of relations: relations between words and their synonyms, entities and their attributes, etc. We show that, for a subset of relations, this…
Results in interpretability suggest that large vision and language models learn implicit linear encodings when models are biased by in-context prompting. However, the existence of similar linear representations in more general adaptation…
Representations learned by pre-training a neural network on a large dataset are increasingly used successfully to perform a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we take a closer look at how features are encoded in such pre-trained…
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…
Transfer learning (TL) leverages previously obtained knowledge to learn new tasks efficiently and has been used to train deep learning (DL) models with limited amount of data. When TL is applied to DL, pretrained (teacher) models are…