Related papers: Token Homogenization under Positional Bias
Tokenization is an important preprocessing step in the training and inference of large language models (LLMs). While there has been extensive research on the expressive power of the neural achitectures used in LLMs, the impact of…
Recent studies have revealed various manifestations of position bias in transformer architectures, from the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon to attention sinks, yet a comprehensive theoretical understanding of how attention masks and…
In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…
We seek to understand how the representations of individual tokens and the structure of the learned feature space evolve between layers in deep neural networks under different learning objectives. We focus on the Transformers for our…
Token uniformity is commonly observed in transformer-based models, in which different tokens share a large proportion of similar information after going through stacked multiple self-attention layers in a transformer. In this paper, we…
Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing…
Token representations influence the efficiency and adaptability of language models, yet conventional tokenization strategies impose rigid segmentation boundaries that do not adjust dynamically to evolving contextual relationships. The…
This study introduces a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models (LLMs) possess genuine reasoning abilities or primarily depend on token bias. We go beyond evaluating LLMs on accuracy; rather, we aim to…
Generative AI models reproduce the human biases in their training data and further amplify them through mechanisms such as mode collapse. The loss of diversity produces homogenization, which not only harms the minoritized but impoverishes…
Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…
We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood…
Subword tokenization introduces a computational layer in language models where many distinct token sequences decode to the same surface form and preserve meaning, yet induce different internal computations. Despite this non-uniqueness,…
This paper investigates the dynamical properties of tokens in pre-trained Transformer models and explores their application to improving Transformers. To this end, we analyze the dynamical system governing the continuous-time limit of the…
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…
Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components,…
Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…
Learning to construct text representations in end-to-end systems can be difficult, as natural languages are highly compositional and task-specific annotated datasets are often limited in size. Methods for directly supervising language…
In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…
Tokenization - the practice of converting strings of characters from an alphabet into sequences of tokens over a vocabulary - is a critical step in the NLP pipeline. The use of token representations is widely credited with increased model…
Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect…