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Natural language is composed of words, but modern large language models (LLMs) process sub-words as input. A natural question raised by this discrepancy is whether LLMs encode words internally, and if so how. We present evidence that LLMs…
Fully finetuning foundation language models (LMs) with billions of parameters is often impractical due to high computational costs, memory requirements, and the risk of overfitting. Although methods like low-rank adapters help address these…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet little is known about their training dynamics at the token level. Evaluation typically relies on aggregated training loss, measured at the batch level, which…
Recent studies reveal that large language models (LLMs) exhibit limited logical reasoning abilities in mathematical problem-solving, instead often relying on pattern-matching and memorization. We systematically analyze this limitation,…
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on custom datasets has become a standard approach for adapting these models to specific domains and applications. However, recent studies have shown that such fine-tuning can lead to significant…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…
We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these…
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance across various tasks by adhering to scaling laws, which significantly increase model size. However, the huge computation overhead during inference hinders the…
Large language models (LLM) trained using the next-token-prediction objective, such as GPT3 and PaLM, have revolutionized natural language processing in recent years by showing impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities across a wide…
Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods typically operate under an implicit assumption: Once a target module is selected, every token passing through it contributes equally to the downstream task and requires a parameter…
Understanding how and what pre-trained language models (PLMs) learn about language is an open challenge in natural language processing. Previous work has focused on identifying whether they capture semantic and syntactic information, and…
Human cognition naturally engages with abstract and fluid concepts, whereas existing reasoning models often rely on generating discrete tokens, potentially constraining their expressive capabilities. Recent advancements aim to address this…
While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using…
Reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on complex tasks but often exhibit overthinking after distillation, generating unnecessarily long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning even for simple inputs and…
General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently fine-tuned through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance performance in specific domains. Better results can be achieved by distilling the chain-of-thought of a larger model at…
Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require long-context understanding, but models continue to struggle with such tasks. We hypothesize that conventional next-token prediction training could contribute to this, because each…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet still suffer from severe inference costs. Recently, abundant works have been proposed to solve this problem with…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but perform better in high-resource scenarios, which presents challenges in low-resource scenarios. Data scarcity and the inherent difficulty of adapting LLMs to specific tasks…
Large language models are trained with tokenizers, and the resulting token distribution is highly imbalanced: a few words dominate the stream while most occur rarely. Recent practice favors ever-larger vocabularies, but it is unclear where…