Related papers: Bilinear representation mitigates reversal curse a…
Massive language models are the core of modern NLP modeling and have been shown to encode impressive amounts of commonsense and factual information. However, that knowledge exists only within the latent parameters of the model, inaccessible…
Efforts to interpret reinforcement learning (RL) models often rely on high-level techniques such as attribution or probing, which provide only correlational insights and coarse causal control. This work proposes replacing nonlinearities in…
Recent probing studies reveal that large language models exhibit linear subspaces that separate true from false statements, yet the mechanism behind their emergence is unclear. We introduce a transparent, one-layer transformer toy model…
In naturalistic learning problems, a model's input contains a wide range of features, some useful for the task at hand, and others not. Of the useful features, which ones does the model use? Of the task-irrelevant features, which ones does…
Arguments in favor of injecting symbolic knowledge into neural architectures abound. When done right, constraining a sub-symbolic model can substantially improve its performance and sample complexity and prevent it from predicting invalid…
Approximate Bayesian inference on the basis of summary statistics is well-suited to complex problems for which the likelihood is either mathematically or computationally intractable. However the methods that use rejection suffer from the…
We tackle the problem of computing counterfactual explanations -- minimal changes to the features that flip an undesirable model prediction. We propose a solution to this question for linear Support Vector Machine (SVMs) models. Moreover,…
Recent progress in language modeling has expanded the range of tasks that can be approached through natural language interfaces, including problems that require structured reasoning. However, it remains unclear how effectively…
Probing and enhancing large language models' reasoning capacity remains a crucial open question. Here we re-purpose the reverse dictionary task as a case study to probe LLMs' capacity for conceptual inference. We use in-context learning to…
Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from intermediate visual cues, either injected via external tools or generated as latent visual tokens during reasoning, but these mechanisms still overlook fine-grained visual evidence…
Counterfactual explanations are widely used to interpret machine learning predictions by identifying minimal changes to input features that would alter a model's decision. However, most existing counterfactual methods have not been tested…
Current pre-trained language models have enabled remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains difficult to distinguish effects of statistical correlation from more systematic logical reasoning grounded on understanding of the…
While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of…
Contextualized or discourse aware commonsense inference is the task of generating coherent commonsense assertions (i.e., facts) from a given story, and a particular sentence from that story. Some problems with the task are: lack of…
In this thesis, we develop various techniques for working with sets in machine learning. Each input or output is not an image or a sequence, but a set: an unordered collection of multiple objects, each object described by a feature vector.…
Grasping the commonsense properties of everyday concepts is an important prerequisite to language understanding. While contextualised language models are reportedly capable of predicting such commonsense properties with human-level…
Language models now provide an interface to express and often solve general problems in natural language, yet their ultimate computational capabilities remain a major topic of scientific debate. Unlike a formal computer, a language model is…
A common approach in neuroscience is to study neural representations as a means to understand a system -- increasingly, by relating the neural representations to the internal representations learned by computational models. However, a…
We formalize a structural property of the causal (autoregressive) language modeling (CLM) objective: reversal invariance. Formally, the next-token prediction loss assigns identical likelihood to a corpus and its reversal, implying that…
We are often interested in decomposing complex, structured data into simple components that explain the data. The linear version of this problem is well-studied as dictionary learning and factor analysis. In this work, we propose a…