Related papers: Where does an LLM begin computing an instruction?

Aligned instruction following models can better fulfill user requests than their unaligned counterparts. However, it has been shown that there is a length bias in evaluation of such models, and that training algorithms tend to exploit this…

Humans often interact with large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn interaction to obtain desired answers or more information. However, most existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of LLMs, in terms of…

Imitation Learning is a sequential task where the learner tries to mimic an expert's action in order to achieve the best performance. Several algorithms have been proposed recently for this task. In this project, we aim at proposing a wide…

Instruction tuning is commonly assumed to endow language models with a domain-general ability to follow instructions, yet the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Does instruction-following rely on a universal mechanism or…

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of performing conditional sequence generation tasks, such as translation or summarization, through instruction fine-tuning. The fine-tuning data is generally sequentially concatenated from a specific…

Large language models (LLMs) are now used in multi-turn workflows, but we still lack a clear way to measure when iteration helps and when it hurts. We present an evaluation framework for iterative refinement that spans ideation, code, and…

Recent interpretability work has identified model-internal handles on post-trained behavior, including refusal directions, assistant/persona axes, and sparse chat-tuning features. These results localize where behaviors can be read out or…

Instructions trigger a production-centered mechanism in language models. Through a cognitively inspired lens that separates language processing and production, we reveal this mechanism as an asymmetry between the two stages by probing…

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify…

Instruction following is one of the fundamental capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As the ability of LLMs is constantly improving, they have been increasingly applied to deal with complex human instructions in real-world…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, where instruction tuning is the critical step in aligning LLMs with user intentions. In this work, we investigate how the instruction tuning adjusts pre-trained models with a…

Instruction Fine-Tuning enhances pre-trained language models from basic next-word prediction to complex instruction-following. However, existing One-off Instruction Fine-Tuning (One-off IFT) method, applied on a diverse instruction, may not…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically prompted to follow a single instruction per inference call. In this work, we analyze whether LLMs also hold the capability to handle multiple instructions simultaneously, denoted as Multi-Task…

To perform few-shot learning, language models extract signals from a few input-label pairs, aggregate these into a learned prediction rule, and apply this rule to new inputs. How is this implemented in the forward pass of modern transformer…

Modality following is the ability to selectively leverage multimodal contexts based on user instructions. It is fundamental to the safety and reliability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in real-world deployments. However, the…

In-context learning (ICL) is a critical emerging capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling few-shot learning during inference by including a few demonstrations (demos) in the prompt. However, it has been found that ICL's…

Real-world instructions with multiple constraints pose a significant challenge to existing large language models (LLMs). An observation is that the LLMs exhibit dramatic performance fluctuation when disturbing the order of the incorporated…

We introduce Instruct-SkillMix, an automated approach for creating diverse, high quality SFT data for instruction-following. The pipeline involves two stages, each leveraging an existing powerful LLM: (1) Skill extraction: uses the LLM to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a natural role in answering complex queries about data streams, but the high computational cost of LLM inference makes them infeasible in many such tasks. We propose online cascade learning, the first…

``Socrates is human. All humans are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.'' This form of argument illustrates a typical pattern of two-hop reasoning. Formally, two-hop reasoning refers to the process of inferring a conclusion by making two…