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Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit abrupt emergent behavior, whereby new abilities arise at certain points during their training. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as a ''phase transition'', remains poorly understood. In this…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being applied in a wide array of settings, well beyond the typical language-oriented use cases. In particular, LLMs are increasingly used as a plug-and-play method for fitting data and generating…
How can pretrained language models (PLMs) learn factual knowledge from the training set? We investigate the two most important mechanisms: reasoning and memorization. Prior work has attempted to quantify the number of facts PLMs learn, but…
Traditional Large Language Model (LLM) pretraining relies on autoregressive language modeling with randomly sampled data from web-scale datasets. Inspired by human learning techniques like spaced repetition, we hypothesize that random…
Large language models (LLMs) are often portrayed as merely imitating linguistic patterns without genuine understanding. We argue that recent findings in mechanistic interpretability (MI), the emerging field probing the inner workings of…
Understanding how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and apply knowledge remains an open challenge. This paper introduces a novel framework, K-(CSA)^2, which categorizes LLM knowledge along two dimensions: correctness and…
Large language models are powerful but costly. We ask whether meta-learning can make the pretraining of small language models not only better but also more interpretable. We integrate first-order MAML with subset-masked LM pretraining,…
The success of large pretrained language models (LMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa has sparked interest in probing their representations, in order to unveil what types of knowledge they implicitly capture. While prior research focused on…
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable success in multilingual translation, their internal core translation mechanisms, even at the fundamental word level, remain insufficiently understood. To address this critical gap,…
Commonsense knowledge is essential for machines to reason about the world. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to perform almost human-like text generation. Despite this success, they fall short as trustworthy…
By providing external information to large language models (LLMs), tool augmentation (including retrieval augmentation) has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the limitations of LLMs' static parametric memory. However, how…
Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…
Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution and theory-of-mind reasoning, both of which require substantial pragmatic understanding. However,…
Large Language Models (LLMs), already shown to ace various unstructured text comprehension tasks, have also remarkably been shown to tackle table (structured) comprehension tasks without specific training. Building on earlier studies of…
Curriculum Learning emphasizes the order of training instances in a computational learning setup. The core hypothesis is that simpler instances should be learned early as building blocks to learn more complex ones. Despite its usefulness,…
The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…
We present a novel framework addressing a critical vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs): the prevalence of factual inaccuracies within intermediate reasoning steps despite correct final answers. This phenomenon poses substantial…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) tackle complex reasoning problems by following long chain-of-thoughts (Long CoT) that incorporate reflection, backtracking, and self-validation. However, the training techniques and data requirements to elicit…
Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts. Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying…
Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs) requires inferring how people's implicit, evolving beliefs shape what they seek and how they act under uncertainty -- especially in high-stakes settings such as disaster…