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The ability to identify influential training examples enables us to debug training data and explain model behavior. Existing techniques to do so are based on the flow of training data influence through the model parameters. For large models…
Pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across a wide range of tasks, yet exhibit substantial variability in the various layers' training quality with respect to specific downstream applications, limiting their…
Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention due to their prominent ability to understand and process texts. Nevertheless, LLMs largely remain opaque. The lack of understanding of LLMs has obstructed the deployment in…
Data-centric learning emphasizes curating high-quality training samples to boost performance rather than designing new architectures. A central problem is to estimate the influence of training sample efficiently. Prior studies largely focus…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. Understanding their internal mechanisms is crucial for developing more interpretable and optimized architectures. Mechanistic interpretability has led to the…
Recent studies suggest that the deeper layers of Large Language Models (LLMs) contribute little to representation learning and can often be removed without significant performance loss. However, such claims are typically drawn from narrow…
Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…
Large language models learn and continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic…
Recent advancements in code large language models (Code-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in resolving programming related tasks. Meanwhile, researchers have recognized that the quality of pre-training data is crucial for…
Confidence calibration, the alignment of a model's predicted confidence with its actual accuracy, is crucial for the reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this critical property remains largely under-explored in…
From extracting features to generating text, the outputs of large language models (LLMs) typically rely on the final layers, following the conventional wisdom that earlier layers capture only low-level cues. However, our analysis shows that…
Two studies tested the hypothesis that a Large Language Model (LLM) can be used to model psychological change following exposure to influential input. The first study tested a generic mode of influence - the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE) -…
Embedding fusion has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing performance across various NLP tasks. However, systematic guidelines for selecting optimal layers and developing effective fusion strategies for the integration of LLMs…
Effective data selection is critical for efficient training of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper introduces Influence Distillation, a novel, mathematically-justified framework for data selection that employs second-order…
In this paper, we ask: what truly determines the effectiveness of RL training data for enhancing language models' reasoning capabilities? While recent advances like o1, Deepseek R1, and Kimi1.5 demonstrate RL's potential, the lack of…
Modern ML systems ingest data aggregated from diverse sources, such as synthetic, human-annotated, and live customer traffic. Understanding \textit{which} examples are important to the performance of a learning algorithm is crucial for…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in performance, their size has escalated significantly, with current LLMs containing billions or even trillions of parameters. However, in this study, we discovered that many layers of…
Aligning large language models (LLMs) through supervised fine-tuning is essential for tailoring them to specific applications. Recent studies suggest that alignment primarily adjusts a model's presentation style rather than its foundational…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…